Abstract
Harnessing the ability of the immune system to eradicate cancer has been a long-held goal of oncology. Work from the last two decades has finally brought immunotherapy into the forefront for cancer treatment, with demonstrable clinical success for aggressive tumors where other therapies had failed. In this review, we will discuss a range of therapies that are in different stages of clinical or preclinical development for companion animals with cancer, and which share the common objective of eliciting adaptive, anti-tumor immune responses. Even though challenges remain, manipulating the immune system holds significant promise to create durable responses and improve outcomes in companion animals with cancer. Furthermore, what we learn from this process will inform and accelerate development of comparable therapies for human cancer patients.
Highlights
The field of cancer immunotherapy, which seeks to harness and enhance the ability of the immune system to eliminate cancer, has gained considerable interest in recent decades with the success of immunotherapeutics in clinical trials for human patients with a variety of hematopoietic and solid tumors [1,2,3,4]
An effective anti-tumor adaptive immune response requires the processing and presentation of tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) by antigen presenting cells to T cells followed by T cell activation and proliferation [4]
Two Antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris®, Seattle Genetics, directed against the CD30 antigen expressed in some lymphocytes) and trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla®, Genentech, targeted against the HER2/neu antigen that is overexpressed by some breast cancers) are approved for use in refractory Hodgkin’s lymphoma and metastatic breast cancer, respectively, and more than 30 other compounds are being tested in human clinical trials [38]
Summary
The field of cancer immunotherapy, which seeks to harness and enhance the ability of the immune system to eliminate cancer, has gained considerable interest in recent decades with the success of immunotherapeutics in clinical trials for human patients with a variety of hematopoietic and solid tumors [1,2,3,4]. Immunological memory may provide long lasting, durable clinical responses [3,4] Both passive and active modalities have been used to generate therapeutic anti-tumor immune responses. As it is often easier to obtain clinical samples from our veterinary patients than from human subjects, studying the similarities and differences in the human and dog immune response may provide the insights needed to optimize immunotherapies. Veterinary trials represent opportunities to develop improved therapeutic modalities, optimize dosing schedules, and identify biomarkers to predict and identify patient responses
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