In recent years, immunotherapy has emerged as the fourth weapon against cancer. Thanks to basic research, which clarified the roles of the immune system, many studies are now investigating the continued potential of immunotherapy as the best way to stimulate patients’ immune systems. Surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy produced important results in all indicators of benefits for the patients, and in the most important one: overall survival. As is well-known, the goal of cancer therapies is an increased survival rate among patients.
As you can read in the abstract of the publication from the National Cancer Institute (NCI – USA), “therapeutic cancer vaccines have the potential of being integrated in the therapy of numerous cancer types and stages. Preclinical and recent clinical studies are now revealing how vaccines can optimally be used with other immune-based therapies such as checkpoint inhibitors, and so-called nonimmune-based therapeutics, radiation, hormonal therapy, and certain small molecule targeted therapies; it is now being revealed that many of these traditional therapies can lyse tumor cells in a manner as to further potentiate the host immune response, alter the phenotype of non-lysed tumor cells to render them more susceptible to T-cell lysis, and/or shift the balance of effector/regulatory cells in a manner to enhance vaccine efficacy. The importance of the tumor microenvironment, the appropriate patient population, and clinical trial endpoints are also key factors for optimizing patient benefit from vaccine-mediated therapy.”
Read the full publication here.
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