An Overview of Promising Immunotherapeutic Strategies in Oncology

In the last two-and-half decades the field of cancer immunotherapy has made remarkable progress, largely due to the clinical development of novel agents including, cytokines, monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, immune checkpoint blockade inhibitors and genetically engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells.Vaccine therapy is specifically designed to stimulate the body's immune system to recognize and target specific antigen(s) on tumor cells.By comparison, the goal of immune checkpoint therapy is not to activate the immune system to attack particular tumor-associated targets, but rather to disable inhibitory pathways that might block effective antitumor T cell responses.Adoptive cell therapy, involves the administration of autologous immune cells with antitumor activity that have been generated and manipulated ex-vivo.The current article will review the clinical development of these promising immunotherapeutic strategies, and briefly discuss their feasibility, utility and affordability in clinical practice.