Although it has been years since the idea of using immune system to fight against cancer come into being, only until recent years do scientists find some successful treatment strategies. By manipulating the immune checkpoints and T cell activation to exert anti-tumor activity, immunotherapy has been applied to a wider range of malignancies now, while it only showed therapeutic potential in several types of cancers in the very beginning. Recently the Cell magazine, titled as “Harnessing Immunotherapy against Cancer“, launched a series of selection reviews, making a comprehensive description of the origins of some of the cancer immunotherapy, the molecular basis of the immune response, some implementations cancer immunotherapy technology, and how they contribute to some extraordinary achievements of the cancer treatments.

Immune Checkpoint Targeting in Cancer Therapy: Toward Combination Strategies with Curative Potential

In this review, James P. Allison and Padmanee Sharma, discusses the past, present and future direction of immunotherapy, and proposed that immune system may play in tumorigenesis an extremely important role. They also describes that some recent molecular studies found some factors that play an important role in the immune checkpoint blockade and T cell activation, which may become a new therapeutic target for therapies design.

Immune Checkpoint Blockade: A Common Denominator Approach to Cancer Therapy
In this article, Suzanne Topalian, Charles Drake and Drew Pardoll have made a comprehensive overview of the potential molecular signaling pathways of immune checkpoints. And the discovery of how these mechanisms contribute to some new treatments. This knowledge may lead people get major victory in the anti-cancer war.

Engineering CAR-T cells: Design concepts
Manipulation of T cell activation plays an important role in cancer immunotherapy. Some development of molecular biology techniques makes it possible to manipulate the signal pathway of T cells to help promote this strategy, and now researchers are moving to change the antigen-specific of T cells. In this review, Shivani Srivastava and Stanley Riddell investigate tumor-targeting chimeric receptors molecular biology, these receptors can enhance T cell adoptive immunotherapy effect, and they have the potential to foster a specific and safe anti-tumor response.

Synthetic biology in cell-based cancer immunotherapy

Synthetic biology methods, allowing researchers with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity to manipulate cell signaling pathways, has been used to tackle with a wide range of biological problems. Deboki Chakravarti and Wilson Wongemail described some of methods like: through the development of synthetic receptors, switches and loops to control T cell activity, we can use them to improve the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy.