Future aspects of immunotherapy and gene therapy in neuroblastoma.

Immunotherapy against cancer aims at stimulating the immune system or building an immune response against targeted tumor-associated antigens (TAAs). It was proposed theoretically as a potential therapy for cancer over a century ago but it became popular in the past two decades. Gene therapy represents a promising approach for reversing the neoplastic phenotype or driving tumor cells to self-destruction. Although survival rates of neuroblastoma (NB) with biologically favorable disease are greater than 90%, outcomes of patients with high risk disease are less than 40%. Stage 4 metastatic NB cases over 18 months of age are often incurable with multimodality chemotherapy regimens. In this article, translation of immuno-gene therapy strategies into clinical trials for NB are reviewed. Future aspects of immuno-gene therapy are discussed.