Developmental Pathways of Cancer Immunotherapy: Successes and Challenges

The history of cancer vaccine research goes back to 1891 when the famous Coley’s toxin wasadministered to boost a patient’s immune system by Dr. William Coley in New York. Since then, there hasbeen intensive research in developing cancer vaccines, with a lot of promise but with limited clinical success,until recently. This is evident from the fact that the FDA approved the first cancer vaccine only in 1991.This all changed with the discovery of checkpoint inhibitors in 1995. The past two decades have seentremendous advancements in cancer immunotherapy, a form of cancer vaccine which uses the body’simmune system to fight cancer, rather than just train to recognize cancer. Improved understanding ofmechanisms by which the cancer cells evade the immune system have led to therapeutic treatments tocounteract the evasion mechanism. In this review, I have examined the evasion techniques employed bycancer cells to hide from the immune system, advancements in the counteracting approaches to reverse theseroadblocks which have led to several different cancer immunotherapies and have identified several gaps inour understanding of cancer, all of which are potential areas for further research. These are promising timesin the fields of immunology and cancer immunotherapy research.