ASO Author Reflections: Immunotherapy for Solid Tumors: A Review

Excerpt

The traditional management of solid malignancies has involved three pillars: surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Although tremendous progress has been made with these methods in managing solid cancers, a plateau in clinical outcome improvement has been reached, especially in stage 4 disease, due to the fine balance between disease control and iatrogenic harm to the patient. After all, cancer cells are an “altered self.” Another treatment method is needed that can discriminate between the “altered self” and the “healthy self,” thus bypassing the limitations of traditional treatments. In the late 19th century, William Coley’s incidental observation of spontaneous cancer remission in patients with erysipelas raised the possibility that the immune system can be used in cancer therapy, with “Coley’s toxin” becoming the first form of immunotherapy.1 In the late twentieth century, Rosenberg and Restifo2 at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) advocated the potential of immune system activation in cancer therapy, but the concept was stubbornly resistant to being converted to mainstream therapy. …