Preface: antibody therapies for cancer

Abstract

It took over a century to validate what Behring (1890) and Ehrlich (1900) have reasoned and predicted the application of antibody-mediated therapies against infectious diseases and cancer. Then, Porter (1967) and Edelman et al. (1968) reported the structure of the immunoglobulin and Kohler and Milstein (1975) described the production of hybridoma cell lines capable of producing monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). This technique began to enter clinical trials. Nadler et al. (1980) treated a patient with relapsed lymphoma with an mAb and was found to be safe and well-tolerated. Subsequent studies failed treatment with this antibody and yielded only short-lived responses (Ritz and Schlossman, 1982). Miller et al. (1982) reported a patient with B-cell lymphoma achieving a complete response after treatment with murine anti-idiotypic antibodies. Further research with generic murine antibodies failed to produce desirable remissions. During the next 15 years, the search for the right target and overcoming previously encountered obstacles began to be accomplished. mAbs have established themselves as one of the most important and fastest growing classes of therapeutic drugs (over 20 approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)) in the treatment of non-malignant and malignant diseases (see reviews by Stern and Herrmann, 2005; Booy et al., 2006). This issue of Oncogene brings together reviews of many of the FDA approved mAbs for cancer, and also reviews on novel mAb-mediated strategies for cancer.