The Mechanism of Stimulating and Mobilizing the Immune System Enhancing the Anti-Tumor Immunity

Abstract

Cancer immunotherapy is a kind of therapy that can control and eliminate tumors by restarting and maintaining the tumor-immune cycle and restoring the body's normal anti-tumor immune response. Although immunotherapy has great potential, it is currently only applicable to patients with certain types of tumors, such as melanoma, lung cancer, and cancer with high mutation load and microsatellite instability, and even in these types of tumors, immunotherapy is not effective for all patients. In order to enhance the effectiveness of tumor immunotherapy, this article reviews the research progress of tumor microenvironment immunotherapy, and studies the mechanism of stimulating and mobilizing immune system to enhance anti-tumor immunity. In this review, we focused on immunotherapy against tumor microenvironment (TME) and discussed the important research progress. TME is the environment for the survival and development of tumor cells, which is composed of cell components and non-cell components; immunotherapy for TME by stimulating or mobilizing the immune system of the body, enhancing the anti-tumor immunity. The checkpoint inhibitors can effectively block the inhibitory immunoregulation, indirectly strengthen the anti-tumor immune response and improve the effect of immunotherapy. We also found the checkpoint inhibitors have brought great changes to the treatment model of advanced tumors, but the clinical treatment results show great individual differences. Based on the close attention to the future development trend of immunotherapy, this study summarized the latest progress of immunotherapy and pointed out a new direction. To study the mechanism of stimulating and mobilizing the immune system to enhance anti-tumor immunity can provide new opportunities for cancer treatment, expand the clinical application scope and effective population of cancer immunotherapy, and improve the survival rate of cancer patients.

Keywords: CAR-T; anti-tumor immunity; checkpoint inhibitors; immune system; immunotherapy.

Figure 1

The tumor microenvironment is composed of cellular and non-cellular components that support tumor growth. Tumor and its microenvironment interact and promote each other through angiogenesis and immunosuppression. Therefore, targeting tumor microenvironment in anti-tumor therapy can make greater progress, such as inhibiting tumor angiogenesis and tumor immunity.

Figure 2

Immune T cells were isolated from patients and genetically engineered in vitro to be fitted with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) that recognize cancer cell surface antigens. The modified cells are amplified in large Numbers in vitro and injected back into the patient to achieve the therapeutic effect of accurately identifying and killing cancer cells.