WIKIMEDIA, KGHCancer therapy has blossomed in the last decade with more than 185 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs on the market, including multiple therapies targeting the immune system. The immune system is the body’s main defense against any malignancy, including cancer. However, most cancers have developed ways to evade the immune system by suppressing or hiding from it. Recently, researchers have begun to devise ways to turn the immune system back “on” in cancer, known as cancer immunotherapy.
The latest FDA-approved cancer immunotherapies have included multiple immune checkpoint inhibitors. To prevent inappropriate destruction of the host, the human immune system is composed of multiple checks and balances called immune checkpoints. These checkpoints consist of pathways that, when triggered, will deactivate the attacking immune cell.
Unfortunately, many cancers have devised ways of manipulating this system. One method is through the upregulation of immune checkpoint molecules, such as programmed death 1 (PD-1) and its ligand (PDL1), which deactivate T cells, a main attacker of tumor cells. Checkpoint inhibitors that block the activation of these molecules, such as anti-PD-1 or PDL1 antibodies, have shown promise in the clinic, with multiple drugs already receiving FDA approval for the treatment of melanoma and lung cancer.
Unlike chemotherapy, which ...
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