Immunotherapy: A Novel Approach to Fight Cancer

Cancer immunotherapy is a type of therapy that uses the body's immune system to prevent, control, and eliminate cancers. The cancer cells on their surface often express the tumor antigens, which are targeted by the immune response components. The past decade has witnessed immunotherapy as an appealing and attractive strategy that established a strong pillar to fight various types of malignancies (Subramaniam et al., 2016). The therapeutic and prophylactic approaches of cancer immunotherapies have been tried against different types of cancers both in human and Veterinary medicine. Beginning with the preventive vaccine for cervical and liver cancer to the first therapy of metastatic melanoma, immunotherapy has already led to major treatment breakthroughs for a number of cancers throughout the world. Currently, the cancer immunotherapy has also become popular in India. Recent success of cancer immunotherapy including monoclonal antibodies, cancer vaccines, adoptive cancer therapy and immune checkpoint inhibitors has revolutionized traditional cancer treatment (Zhang and Chen, 2018). Incorporation of novel immunotherapeutic approaches has the potential to not only improve survival of cancer patients, but also reduce reliance on genotoxic high-dose chemoradiation (Sambi et al., 2019). However, there are many challenges in the way of cancer immunotherapy that will enable to select the rational strategies for overcoming barriers to effective antitumor responses (Dougan et al., 2019). Immunotherapy of cancer is a rapidly evolving field and despite the several obstacles, its current advanced approach has been proved as a potent defensive weapon because of which the deadly diseases like cancers are possible to cure, though not in all, but in many patients.