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Volume 02
Journal of Immune Disorders & Therapy
J Immune Disord Ther, Volume 02
December 09-10, 2019 | Barcelona, Spain
9
th
WORLD CONGRESS ON
IMMUNOLOGY AND CANCER
World Immunology 2019 & Cancer Summit 2019
December 09-10, 2019
Immunotherapy: Strategies for expanding its role to treat all major tumor sites
Chandan Sanghera
Imperial College London, UK
I
mmunotherapy is widely regarded to have the ability to transform the treatment of cancer, not least because it avoids the many
limitations of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. As immunotherapy effectively harnesses the immune system, in principle it
should be able to treat a broad range of tumor types independent of the underlying histology or driver mutations. However,
to date immunotherapy has only demonstrated efficacy in a select group of cancers and usually in a minority of patients with
those cancers, limiting its use as a treatment. This can be partly attributed to additional immunosuppressive mechanisms in the
tumor microenvironment that help promote and maintain a state of T cell exhaustion. As such, numerous strategies are being
employed to combat these evasive mechanisms and expand the role of immunotherapy to treat all major cancers. In particular, the
exploration of combinatory immunotherapies is a promising area of research, and includes the combination of immune checkpoint
inhibitors with cytotoxic therapies, cancer vaccines and monoclonal antibodies against other co- inhibitory and co-stimulatory
receptors. Strategies to improve the homing, extravasation and survival of CAR-T cells in the tumor microenvironment are
also being investigated. Furthermore, the development of immunotherapies targeted
to one or multiple neoantigens unique to a specific tumor may act to enhance anti-
tumor immunity, as well as reduce immune-related adverse events (irAEs). As
immunotherapy evolves to become a mainstay treatment for cancer, it is imperative
that optimum treatment regimens that maximize bioavailability and efficacy, whilst
limiting toxicity, are developed. Foremost, appropriate biomarkers must be identified,
in order to help tailor combinatory immunotherapies to the individual patient and
hence pave the way to a new era of personalized medicine.
chandan.sanghera14@imperial.ac.ukFigure 1: Combinatory immunotherapy approaches and
their synergistic mechanisms of action