These are exciting times for the field of cancer immunotherapy. Although the clinical efficacy of monoclonal antibodies has been demonstrated since the early 1990s, the therapeutic profile of other immunotherapeutic approaches-especially vaccines-has not yet been formally clarified. However, the recent success of several immunotherapeutic regimens in cancer patients has boosted the development ...

Phase I oncology trials are designed to identify a safe dose with an acceptable toxicity profile. In traditional phase I dose-finding design, the dose is typically determined based on the probability of severe toxicity observed during the first treatment cycle. The recent development of molecularly targeted agents and cancer immunotherapies call for new innovations in phase I designs, because o...

Dendritic cells (DC) are important antigen-presenting cells (APC) that can prime naive T-cells and control lymphocyte-mediated adaptive immune responses with respect to magnitude, memory, and self-tolerance. Understanding the biology of these cells is central to the development of new generation immunotherapies for cancer and chronic infection. This chapter presents a brief overview of DC biolo...

The Janus-faced roles of macrophages in cancer imply both tumor-suppressive and -stimulating actions of these innate immune cells. Whereas the balance is toward tumor promotion in most epithelial cancers, we have recently shown that osteosarcoma metastasis seems to be inhibited by macrophages. Here we discuss the possible mechanism of this observation.

Cancer immunotherapy is gaining momentum in the clinic. The current challenge is to understand why a proportion of cancer patients do not respond to cancer immunotherapy, and how this can be translated into the rational design of combinatorial cancer immunotherapy strategies aimed at maximizing success of immunotherapy. Here, we discuss how tumors orchestrate an immunosuppressive microenvironme...

The only causative treatment for IgE-mediated allergies is allergen-specific immunotherapy. However, fewer than 5% of allergy patients receive immunotherapy because of its long duration and risk of allergic side effects. We aimed at enhancing s.c. immunotherapy by direct administration of allergen into s.c. lymph nodes. The objective was to evaluate safety and efficacy compared with conventiona...

Immunotherapy has been one of the standard treatment options for lung cancer. Biomarkers such as PD-L1 and TMB have a certain predictive role on efficacy. At same time, studies also found that EGFR mutations ALK fusions were inversely related to efficacy immunotherapy. The MYSTIC trial evaluated STK11, KEAP1, ARID1A, KRAS their correlation with immune results showed STK11 and/or KEAP1 had poor ...

This article, the second in a series of three, provides an overview of the efficacy and safety of cancer immunotherapies ranging from monoclonal antibodies to vaccines, including additional clinical considerations regarding immune checkpoint blockers.

Background Pharmacovigilance studies are helpful to follow the use of allergen immunotherapy in clinical practice. Industrially manufactured allergen vaccines (VALERGEN) of three mite species (including the tropical species Dermatophagoides siboney and Blomia tropicalis) have been recently introduced country-wide in Cuba for asthma treatment. To assess the safety and efficacy of allergen immuno...