Recent successes of cancer immunotherapy: a new dimension in personalized medicine?

Excerpt

Until recently, cancer therapy was limited to “debulking approaches” including surgery, chemo–radio- and hormono-therapy and compounds targeting oncogenes or proangiogenic pathways. Unfortunately, phase III studies pointed out that such strategies, remarkable against primary tumors, mostly affected time to progression but rarely overall survival, suggesting that long-term protective effects were not achieved. Immunotherapy which has long been opposed to chemotherapy because of its susceptibility to drug-induced apoptosis and its lack of efficacy to immediately “debulk,” comes of age for a main reason: immunotherapy may be the sole approach to elicit cancer-specific adaptive immune responses and long-term protection against metastases. Can it be any cure without the involvement of the immune system? …