Next-generation combination approaches for immune checkpoint therapy

Abstract

Immune checkpoint therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, leading to dramatic clinical outcomes for a subset of patients. However, many patients do not experience durable responses following immune checkpoint therapy owing to multiple resistance mechanisms, highlighting the need for effective combination strategies that target these resistance pathways and improve clinical responses. The development of combination strategies based on an understanding of the complex biology that regulates human antitumor immune responses has been a major challenge. In this Review, we describe the current landscape of combination therapies. We also discuss how the development of effective combination strategies will require the integration of small, tissue-rich clinical trials, to determine how therapy-driven perturbation of the human immune system affects downstream biological responses and eventual clinical outcomes, reverse translation of clinical observations to immunocompetent preclinical models, to interrogate specific biological pathways and their impact on antitumor immune responses, and novel computational methods and machine learning, to integrate multiple datasets across clinical and preclinical studies for the identification of the most relevant pathways that need to be targeted for successful combination strategies. In this Review, Sharma and colleagues describe the current landscape of combination therapies and discuss requirements for the development of effective combination strategies.