Advances in Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing the Immune System for Cancer Treatment

In the last decade, harnessing the immune system with immune checkpoint blockades has achieved remarkable results in solid tumors of different histotypes, enabling durable responses and long-term survival. Despite these unprecedented results, primary or acquired resistance can limit its efficacy; thus, a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms of resistance is crucial for the identification of novel therapeutic strategies in several clinical settings (e.g. adjuvant, neo-adjuvant setting, rare tumors, etc.). Immunotherapy research needs to answer some key questions, from mechanistic exploration of lack of response, to biomarker identification, to the development of novel immunotherapeutic modalities and their clinical application.