Immunotherapy is a treatment that uses specific components of a person's immune system to fight diseases. This is usually done by stimulating or assisting one's immune system is attacking the offending agent – for instance, in the case of cancer – the target of immunotherapy will be cancer cells. Some types of immunotherapy are also called biologic therapy or biotherapy. One of the fundamental challenges that a living cell encounters are to accurately copy its genetic material to daughter cells during every single cell cycle. When this process goes haywire, genomic instability ensues, and genetic alterations ranging from nucleotide changes to chromosomal translocations and aneuploidy occur. Genomic instability arising out of DNA structural changes (indels, rearrangements, etc.,) can give rise to mutations predisposing to cancer. Cancer prevention refers to actions taken to mitigate the risk of getting cancer. The past decade has encountered an explosive rate of development of anticancer therapy ranging from standard chemotherapy to novel targeted small molecules that are nearly cancer specific, thereby reducing collateral damage. However, a new class of emerging therapy aims to train the body's defense system to fight against cancer. Termed as “cancer immunotherapy” is the new approach that has gained worldwide acceptance. It includes using antibodies that bind to and inhibit the function of proteins expressed by cancer cells or engineering and boosting the person's own T lymphocytes to target cancer. In this review, we summarized the recent advances and developments in cancer immunotherapy along with their shortcoming and challenges.


中文翻译：

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癌症免疫疗法：最新进展和挑战


免疫疗法是一种使用人体免疫系统的特定成分来对抗疾病的治疗方法。这通常是通过刺激或协助一个人的免疫系统攻击攻击因子来完成的——例如，在癌症的情况下——免疫治疗的目标将是癌细胞。某些类型的免疫疗法也称为生物疗法或生物疗法。活细胞遇到的基本挑战之一是在每个细胞周期中准确地将其遗传物质复制到子细胞中。当这个过程失控时，基因组不稳定性随之而来，从核苷酸变化到染色体易位和非整倍体的遗传改变都会发生。由 DNA 结构变化（插入缺失、重排等）引起的基因组不稳定性会导致易患癌症的突变。癌症预防是指为降低患癌症风险而采取的行动。在过去的十年中，抗癌疗法的发展速度呈爆炸式增长，从标准化学疗法到几乎是癌症特异性的新型靶向小分子，从而减少了附带损害。然而，一种新的新兴疗法旨在训练身体的防御系统来对抗癌症。被称为“癌症免疫疗法”的新方法已获得全球认可。它包括使用与癌细胞或工程表达的蛋白质结合并抑制其功能的抗体，并增强人自身的 T 淋巴细胞来靶向癌症。在这篇综述中，我们总结了癌症免疫治疗的最新进展和发展，以及它们的不足和挑战。