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Review
. 2019 Jun 15;20(12):2927.
doi: 10.3390/ijms20122927.

Ovarian Cancer Immunotherapy: Turning up the Heat

Eleonora Ghisoni  1   2 , Martina Imbimbo  3 , Stefan Zimmermann  4 , Giorgio Valabrega  5
Affiliations
Review

Ovarian Cancer Immunotherapy: Turning up the Heat

Eleonora Ghisoni et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the leading cause of death among gynecological malignancies. Despite surgery and chemotherapy, 5-years survival rates have improved only modestly over the past few decades remaining at 45% for advanced stages. Therefore, novel therapies are urgently needed. The presence of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in OC tumor microenvironment (TME) has already proved to be correlated with overall survival (OS), while immune evasion mechanisms are associated with poor prognosis. Although these data indicate that immunotherapy has a strong rationale in OC, single agent immune-checkpoints inhibitors (ICIs) have shown only modest results in this malignancy. In this review, we will discuss immune-targeting combination therapies and adoptive cell therapy (ACT), highlighting the challenges represented by these strategies, which aim at disrupting the stroma-tumor barrier to boost immune system against ovarian cancer.

Keywords: adoptive cell therapy; immunotherapy; ovarian cancer; tumor infiltrating-lymphocytes; tumor microenvironment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Representative scheme of combination therapies approaches and adoptive cell therapy (ACT) in OC.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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