Tumor Immunotherapy


 

Immunotherapy is among the better treatment options currently available to brain tumor patients.  Several specific types of immunotherapy which have already shown promising preliminary clinical results are listed in Section 3.1 of this website.  Currently, in the US, these treatments are only available through clinical trials, although that may not necessarily be the case internationally.

Immunology and immunotherapy are inherently complex subjects.  For basic introductions, see the following Wikipedia entries:

For more detailed overviews of the immune system (though slightly dated), see:

For papers on immunotherapy, see:

  • Rutkowski et al 2004
  • Emens and Jaffee 2005  -  Discusses combining immunotherapy with cytotoxic chemotherapy.
  • de Visser et al 2006
  • de Vleeschouwer et al 2006
  • Stix 2007 - Discusses the role of chronic inflammation in cancer and other diseases.  This paper was published in Scientific American and is suitable for a general audience.
  • Prendergast and Jaffee 2007  -  A valuable paper which ties together concepts from tumor cell genetics, microevironment, inflammation, and immunology.  Three key ideas proposed are: (1) "therapeutic strategies that fail to harness the immune system will always be defeated by tumor resistance, due to the large 'genomic space' that genetically plastic tumor cells can readily access to evolve resistance mechanisms,"  (2) "using molecular targeted agents to reverse tumoral immune suppression may offer a powerful method to leverage the efficacy of most if not all therapeutic agents," and "smoldering" inflammation may be related to tumoral immunosuppression, and (3) "by ablating immunosuppression mechanisms, cytotoxic chemotherapy might synergize with, rather than antogonize, active immunotherapy."
  • Cheever 2008
  • Das et al 2008  -  Relatively short and up to date, thus a good choice to read first.
  • de Vleeschouwer et al 2008
  • Emens 2008  -  Discusses combining immunotherapy with cytotoxic chemotherapy.
  • Gray et al 2008
  • Koski et al 2008
  • Luptrawan et al 2008
  • Mitchell et al 2008

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