Advances in Vaccines, Checkpoint Blockade and Chimeric Antigen Receptor based Cancer Immunotherapeutics

Increase in cancer cases -numerically and etiologically encouraged research aiming development of novel treatment strategies, amongst which few are even implemented but with varying degrees of success along with specific limitations. For example, conventional treatment strategies viz. chemotherapy and radiotherapy have limited potential owing to their nonspecific cytotoxic nature thereby shifting focus towards immunotherapy. Recently, target specific immunotherapeutic regimens have been evaluated for their efficacy including 1) vaccines harnessing tumor specific/associated antigens, 2) checkpoint blockade therapy using monoclonal antibodies against PD1, CTLA-4 and others, 3) adoptive cell transfer approaches viz. CAR-cell-based therapies. Here we review recent advancements on these target specific translational immunotherapeutic strategies against cancer/s and concerned limitations.