Basics of Immunity

This chapter will serve as a brief review of immunology for oncologists. No single chapter can fully describe the complexity of the immune system and so the goal here will be to simply serve as a refresher. Innate and adaptive immunity will be concisely reviewed, with a brief description of the cells of each system. Focus will then be paid to the how T cells are activated and function. Finally, basic principles of T cell-mediated immunity to tumors will be presented. These foundational concepts will be useful for understanding later chapters which largely deal with the purposeful engineering of immune cells for adoptive cellular therapies. An attempt has been made to highlight recent review articles for further reading, with an emphasis on those that involve tumor immunology.