Cancer immunotherapy has gained a lot of interest over the past few years due to the success of immune checkpoint inhibitors in treating cancer (1, 2). Immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as monoclonal antibodies against cytotoxic T-lymphocyte–associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4) and programmed death 1 (PD-1), have been shown to increase survival of patients with advanced cancers (1, 2). These in...

background: regulatory t cells (t-regs) have an important role in cancer by suppression of protective antitumor immune responses. regulatory t cells express the forkhead/winged helix transcription factor (foxp3) and ox40 molecules which have important regulatory roles in the immune system. objective: to evaluate foxp3 and ox40 transcripts in the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of women with ...

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in Western countries. Prostate cancer-related death occurs in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Although several new drugs for castration-resistant prostate cancer have been approved, each of these has prolonged survival by just a few months. Consequently, new ther...

It has been two years since clinical development of cancer immunotherapy has started to turn from decades of failures to its first successes in randomized Phase 3 trials with Sipuleucel-T, a dendritic cellbased vaccine, and ipilimumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting CTLA-4. Both are increasing patient survival in their target diseases. The path to these successes was, in part, paved by the met...

Immunotherapy is revolutionizing cancer care across disciplines. The original success of immune checkpoint blockade in melanoma has already been translated to Food and Drug Administration-approved therapies in a number of other cancers, and a large number of clinical trials are underway in many other disease types, including breast cancer. Here, we review the basic requirements for a successful...

Pancreatic cancer is a highly aggressive and notoriously difficult to treat. As the vast majority of patients are diagnosed at advanced stage of the disease, only a small population is curative by surgical resection. Although gemcitabine-based chemotherapy is typically offered as standard of care, most patients do not survive longer than 6 months. Thus, new therapeutic approaches are needed. Pa...

The advent of immunotherapy, especially checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapy, has provided novel and powerful weapons against cancer. Because only a subset of cancer patients exhibit durable responses, further exploration of the mechanisms underlying the resistance to immunotherapy in the bulk of cancer patients is merited. Such efforts may help to identify which patients could benefit from...

Cancers utilize multiple mechanisms to overcome immune responses. Emerging evidence suggest that immunotherapy of cancer should focus on inducing and re-programming cells of the innate and adaptive immune systems rather than focusing solely on T cells. Recently, we have shown that such a multifaceted approach can improve immunotherapy of breast cancer.

In this article, evidence is reviewed suggesting that the outcome of cancer immunotherapy depends on pre-treatment immune parameters of a patient. The results described in the article show that immunotherapy may prolong survival in certain subgroups of cancer patients, while in other subgroups a cancer-promoting effect of this treatment modality cannot be excluded.

Immune-related radiological and biomarker monitoring in cancer immunotherapy trials permits interrogation of efficacy and reasons for therapeutic failure. We report the results from a cross-sectional analysis of response monitoring in 685 T-cell checkpoint-targeted cancer immunotherapy trials in solid malignancies, as registered on the U.S. National Institutes of Health trial registry by Octobe...