• Sebastián J Reyes, Konstanza B González, Constanza Rodríguez, Camila Navarrete-Muñoz, Andrea P Salazar, Alejandro Villagra, Christian Caglevic, and Matías I Hepp.
• Departamento de Ciencias Básicas y Morfología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Concepción, Chile.
• Rev Med Chil. 2020 Jul 1; 148 (7): 970-982.

AbstractCancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The success rate of conventional anticancer therapeutic approaches such as chemotherapy is limited by the non-specific toxicity and low specificity towards specific tumors, which are highly dependent on the mutational burden present on each patient. Similarly, targeted therapies have proven to induce resistance in numerous malignancies. Therefore, immunotherapy has emerged as a better approach to discriminate between "the own" and "the non-own", which occurs through two types of mechanisms, innate and acquired immunity. Acquired immunity is one of the targets for new immunotherapeutic treatments, unleashing the power of antigen-specific T cells as a potential therapeutic weapon for cancer treatment. Thus, immunotherapy modifies the own immune system to increase the recognition and elimination of cancer cells by identifying these cancer antigens. One of the advantages of immunotherapy, when compared to conventional anticancer approaches, is the generation of long-term immunity (immunological memory). Currently, there are different potential types of immunotherapy in cancer to promote the modulation of the immune response. Among them, the use of cytokines, vaccines, viruses, monoclonal antibodies, and the generation of adaptive immune response cells have achieved successful results in some types of cancer.

15 keywords...

hide…