Cancer Immunotherapy: Lights and Shadows

Abstract

Cancer immunotherapy has recently emerged as the fourth treatment modality, in addition to surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. These advances are the result of important discoveries in the field of regulation of the immune response, especially on the mechanisms which turn “on” and “off” immune responses (1, 2). A disease which has proved to be a canonical model to test therapeutic immunotherapy is the immunogenic cutaneous melanoma (3). So far, “passive” immunotherapy with monoclonal antibodies has outpaced “active” immunotherapy with antitumor vaccines (4, 5), and monoclonal antibodies which antagonize the “off” responses have been recently introduced in clinical practice (6, 7) ...