In this paper, we review the different mechanisms of the human immune system in inhibiting cancer grow and the possible loopholes allowing the cancer cell to evade the immune system response. | Journal of military pharmaco-medicine no1-2019 CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY: A REVIEW Nguyen Thi Kim Tran1; Nguyen Thanh Minh2; Jake Chen2 SUMMARY The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine signifies that cancer immunotherapy is becoming the most promising direction in cancer research. In this paper, we review the different mechanisms of the human immune system in inhibiting cancer grow and the possible loopholes allowing the cancer cell to evade the immune system response. Understanding these mechanisms allows designing many different strategies to treat cancer using the patient’s immune system as the major ‘fighting force’. We would also review the most recent clinical trials in cancer immunotherapy and briefly explain the remaining challenges on applying cancer immunotherapy in larger scale. * Key words: Cancer immunotherapy. INTRODUCTION The idea of cancer immunotherapy started at the beginning of the 20th century; however, cancer immunotherapy has been a research interest for only 20 years. This is due to the rapid development of molecular biology, genetics, and the decreasing cost of sequencing. Molecular biology helps discovering many mechanisms of immune respond and the signaling pathways triggering these responses. Genetics allows finding different variation of genes participating in these signaling pathways and identifying which type of variation may help the tumor progression. Certainly, these fields could not progress without lowering the cost of sequencing, which allows studying the cancer patients’ genome in larger scale. The most significant benefit of cancer immunotherapy is that this strategy uses the patient’s natural capability of immune respond as the major “fighting force” against cancer. Therefore, it is expected to cause the least side-effects or damage on the patient, as showed in [1]. However, it could be among the “hardest” treatments to design. At this point, we may expect that more than 60% of the cancer patients do not respond well with .
