Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) is an approach to cancer treatment that involves the use of antitumor immune cells to target residual disease in patients after completion of chemo/radiotherapy. ACT has several advantages compared with other approaches in cancer immunotherapy, including the ability to specifically expand effector cells in vitro before selection for adoptive transfer, as well as the opportunity for host manipulation in order to enhance the ability of transferred cells to recognize and kill established tumors. One of the main challenges to the success of ACT in cancer clinical trials is the identification and generation of antitumor effector cells with high avidity for tumor recognition. Natural killer (NK) cells, cytokine-induced killers and natural killer T cells are key innate or innate-like effector cells in cancer immunosurveillance that act at the interface between innate and adaptive immunity, to have a greater influence over immune responses to cancer. In this review, we discuss recent studies that highlight their potential in cancer therapy and summarize clinical trials using these effector immune cells in adoptive cellular therapy for the treatment of cancer.