Disis Mary L
Tumor Vaccine Group, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
Semin Oncol. 2014 Oct;41 Suppl 5:S3-13. doi: 10.1053/j.seminoncol.2014.09.004. Epub 2014 Sep 6.
The immune system plays a vital role in regulating the growth of tumors. Some types of inflammatory responses can promote tumor growth, while a tumor-specific adaptive immune response can potentially control tumor growth. Malignancies have the ability to evade the immune system, and proliferate and metastasize. The goal of immunotherapy is to marshal the specificity and long-term memory of the adaptive immune response to achieve durable tumor regression and possible cure, although, to date, this has been achieved in only a small subset of patients. A variety of approaches to immunotherapy have been investigated. These include administration of exogenous cytokines or therapeutic vaccines to increase the frequency of tumor-specific T cells, adoptive transfer of tumor-specific immune effector cells, and, more recently, the application of a variety of immune checkpoint inhibitors and agonists of co-stimulatory receptors to overcome tumor-induced immune-suppressive mechanisms. Some approaches have been more successful than others for reasons that are now becoming apparent, and these observations have led to an exciting resurgence in clinical research to develop more effective immunotherapeutic strategies.
免疫系统在调节肿瘤生长方面起着至关重要的作用。某些类型的炎症反应可促进肿瘤生长，而肿瘤特异性适应性免疫反应则有可能控制肿瘤生长。恶性肿瘤有能力逃避免疫系统，并进行增殖和转移。免疫疗法的目标是利用适应性免疫反应的特异性和长期记忆来实现持久的肿瘤消退并可能治愈，尽管迄今为止，仅在一小部分患者中实现了这一目标。已经研究了多种免疫疗法。这些方法包括给予外源性细胞因子或治疗性疫苗以增加肿瘤特异性T细胞的频率，过继转移肿瘤特异性免疫效应细胞，以及最近应用多种免疫检查点抑制剂和共刺激受体激动剂来克服肿瘤诱导的免疫抑制机制。由于现在已逐渐明了的原因，某些方法比其他方法更成功，这些观察结果促使临床研究重新兴起，以开发更有效的免疫治疗策略。
