Current trends of anticancer immunochemotherapy

The paradigm of combinatorial anticancer therapy is nowadays deeply established into the clinical routine, reflecting the notion that–with a few notable exceptions–standalone chemoor radiotherapeutic regimens are always insufficient to completely eradicate neoplastic lesions. Moreover, combining agents with distinct mechanisms of action potentially results in synergistic antineoplastic effects. This not only allows for the use of decreased drug dosages, de facto limiting the incidence and severity of side effects, but also significantly reduces the likelihood that malignant cells may become chemoor radioresistant. Along with the development of ever more efficient strategies to elicit or boost anticancer immunity and with the realization that most successful antineoplastic agents operate–at least in part–by (re)activating tumor-specific immune responses, great interest has been attracted by the possibility to develop combinatorial immunotherapeutic interventions and/or to combine chemoor radiotherapeutic regimens with immunotherapy. Thus, an ever increasing amount of literature describes preclinical and clinical studies investigating whether and under which conditions several distinct immunostimulatory agents can be combined to each other or with conventional antineoplastic regimens to obtain improved therapeutic responses and/or reduced side effects. Intriguingly, both immunotherapeutic regimens and antineoplastic agents that Current trends of anticancer immunochemotherapy