Patient-tailored modulation of the immune system may revolutionize future lung cancer treatment

BMC Cancer

Review

Joost P Hegmans¹  Henk C Hoogsteden¹  Marlies E Heuvers¹  Robin Cornelissen¹  Joachim G Aerts²  Harry Groen³ 

[1] Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Erasmus Medical Center, Postbox 2040, 3000, Rotterdam, CA, The Netherlands;Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Erasmus Medical Center, Postbox 2040, 3000, Rotterdam, CA, The Netherlands;Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Amphia Hospital, Breda, The Netherlands;Department of Pulmonary Medicine, University Medical Centrum Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands;

关键词: Lung cancer;    Tumor microenvironment;    Immune system;    Personalized medicine;    Cancer immunology;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2407-12-580

 received in 2012-08-17, accepted in 2012-11-15,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Cancer research has devoted most of its energy over the past decades on unraveling the control mechanisms within tumor cells that govern its behavior. From this we know that the onset of cancer is the result of cumulative genetic mutations and epigenetic alterations in tumor cells leading to an unregulated cell cycle, unlimited replicative potential and the possibility for tissue invasion and metastasis. Until recently it was often thought that tumors are more or less undetected or tolerated by the patient’s immune system causing the neoplastic cells to divide and spread without resistance. However, it is without any doubt that the tumor environment contains a wide variety of recruited host immune cells. These tumor infiltrating immune cells influence anti-tumor responses in opposing ways and emerges as a critical regulator of tumor growth. Here we provide a summary of the relevant immunological cell types and their complex and dynamic roles within an established tumor microenvironment. For this, we focus on both the systemic compartment as well as the local presence within the tumor microenvironment of late-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), admitting that this multifaceted cellular composition will be different from earlier stages of the disease, between NSCLC patients. Understanding the paradoxical role that the immune system plays in cancer and increasing options for their modulation may alter the odds in favor of a more effective anti-tumor immune response. We predict that the future standard of care of lung cancer will involve patient-tailor-made combination therapies that associate (traditional) chemotherapeutic drugs and biologicals with immune modulating agents and in this way complement the therapeutic armamentarium for this disease.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Heuvers et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.