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INTRODUCTION

Immunotherapy is a new way of treating cancer by harnessing a person’s immune system. Instead of directly destroying cancer cells (such as by using chemotherapy or radiotherapy), immunotherapy uses the patient’s or donor’s immune cells (such as T, NK or DC cells) to destroy cancer cells.

In general, immunotherapy comes in variety of form, including:

  • - Monoclonal antibodies and tumor-agnostic therapies (targeted antibodies)
  • - Non-specific immunotherapies
  • - Oncolytic virus therapy
  • - T-cell-based therapy
  • - Cancer vaccines

Cancer immunotherapy holds several key advantages over traditional therapies: high specificity, little or no side efects for active immunization, although adverse efects may occur in adoptive cell transfer (ACT) and good safety profile. The key point of immunotherapy is to use the patient’s own immune system to control and destroy cancer cells.

T-cell-based therapy is part of adoptive cell transfer (ACT). To date, ACT has been demonstrated to be the most efective immunotherapy method for cancer treatment and has achieved very promising results in cancer clinical trials