Abstract

IMMUNITY SYSTEM AGAINST BRAIN TUMOUR

Priti Jadhav*, Gauri Kashid and Ashish Jagtap

Abstract

Cytokines are molecular messengers that allow the cells of the immune system to communicate with one another to generate a coordinated, robust, but self-limited response to a target antigen. The growing interest over the past two decades in harnessing the immune system to eradicate cancer has been accompanied by heightened efforts to characterize cytokines and exploit their vast signalling networks to develop cancer treatments. Cytokines directly stimulate immune effector cells and stromal cells at the tumour site and enhance tumour cell recognition by cytotoxic effector cells. Recent years have seen a number of cytokines, including GM-CSF, IL-7, IL-12, IL-15, IL-18 and IL-21, enter clinical trials for patients with advanced cancer. There is ongoing pre-clinical work supporting the neutralization of suppressive cytokines, such as IL-10 and TGF-β in promoting anti-tumour immunity. In addition, advances in adoptive cell therapy have relied on the use of cytokines to create an in vitro, highly controlled environment for the optimal development of anti-tumour T cells. Numerous animal tumour model studies have demonstrated that cytokines have broad antitumour activity and this has been translated into a number of cytokine-based approaches for cancer therapy. The review will also describe new cytokines in pre-clinical development, combinations of biological agents, novel delivery mechanisms, and potential directions for future investigation using cytokines.

Keywords: Cytokines directly stimulate immune effector cells and stromal cells at the tumour site and enhance tumour cell recognition by cytotoxic effector cells.