Therapeutic Impact of Immune Responses in Cancer

Therapeutic targeted oncoimmunology has a long history reaching back to the nineteenth century and represents the basis of modern tumor immunology. Cell biological and molecular genetic techniques have uncovered crucial cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying effective cancer immunotherapies used in the clinic. To illustrate the scientific way that led to actual insights into the molecular and cellular approaches realized in recent cancer therapies, this chapter introduces into the history of oncoimmunology. Experimental findings of adoptive cell transfer-based cancer therapy are summarized under functional, immunological aspects. An actual overview of the antitumor prosperity of all genetically engineered tumor cells expressing recombinant cytokines which were characterized by animal experiments is given. The application of antigen-presenting cells which are triple transgenic for immune stimulatory cytokines, tumor specific antigens, and the correlated major histocompatibility complex class I necessary for tumor antigen presentation is explained exemplarily. A recent experimental animal model characterizing critical parameters for preconditioning the host prior to ACT of transgenic T cells and essential therapeutic conditions is described