Preface

Battling cancer is an all-time endeavor of both clinicians and scientists in the past several decades; however, the patient outcomes have not been significantly improved with those efforts, which urge people to find new strategies to change the status quo. In recent years, in the awareness that the human immune system has its intrinsic mechanism to control microbial pathogens and dysfunctioned self-tissues, therefore, people started to conceive the idea of treating cancer by using the immune mechanism that shortly has become a major research field coined as cancer immunotherapy. After gaining solid evidences in recent years that immunotherapy has critically enhanced the prognoses of cancer patients, it acclaimed a wider recognition from the society, for instances, it has been named the 2013 Science’s Breakthrough of the Year. Of note, at this cheerful moment, it is a great pleasure and honor for us to provide our understandings and perspectives in cancer immunotherapy by presenting this book to our respected audiences. We hope this book will help audiences comprehend the concept and mechanistic studies involved in this emerging but booming subject of cancer immunotherapy.

The key feature of this book is it attempts to summarize different approaches have been studied and used in cancer immunotherapy based on the different components of human immune system. The book lists the major immune system components which have been demonstrated involving in limiting or killing tumor and their relevant applications in treating cancer patients. In addition, general introductions of engineered as well as targeted cancer immunotherapies are also included in this book to further broad the scope of our audiences. In summary, this book serves as a big map trying to picture all major branches in cancer immunotherapy; meanwhile, it also tries to pull different information together to give our audiences a general impression of utilizing components of the immune system in treating cancer.

In terms of the organization of this book, first of all, in the opening section of this book, it briefly summarizes the major features of different components of human immune system then introduces the relationships and interactions between tumor and the immune system. Later on, it focuses on the immunity of different immune components that against tumor and their relevant applications in clinics. The second section emphasizes on the cancer immunotherapy by using engineered components of the immune system to treat cancer, such as engineered antibodies, T cell receptors and cytokines. Following this, the concluding section of this book puts some outlooks on the emerging studies in designing of potential new cancer therapies, for example, targeting costimulatory signals in controlling T cell function; applying stem cell as a novel source of T cells in treating cancer; restraining aberrant regulatory T cells in cancer patients, and modulating tumor microenvironment to minimize its suppressive effects on anti-cancer immunity.

Hopefully, this book series will provide an introductory description about this complex concept of cancer immunotherapy. For the best comprehension and use of the knowledge and insights this book provides, readers are highly recommended to read the references listed at the end of each chapter and browse up-to-date literatures on specific topic readers are interested in. Also, we acknowledge that it is merely possible to cover all detailed information about this fast-growing specialty of cancer immunotherapy in this book through our limited efforts, therefore, we sincerely encourage our readers to keep searching the most updated literature and we believe this is the most efficient approach to capture the essences in cancer immunotherapy.