Current status of immunotherapy for the treatment of lung cancer

Immunotherapy is a novel approach for the treatment of systemic malignancies. Passive and adaptive immunotherapy have been applied to the treatment of a wide variety of solid tumors such as malignant melanoma (1), renal cell carcinoma (2) and ovarian cancer (3). Several early clinical trials of immune based therapy for both non-small (NSCLC) and small cell lung cancer (SCLC) have demonstrated limited or no success (3,4) but recent trials of antigen-specific cancer immunotherapy have shown early therapeutic potential and are now being rigorously evaluated on a larger scale (5). In this communication we briefly review the historic aspects of immune based therapy for solid cancer, describe therapeutic strategies aimed at targeting lung cancer, and discuss limitations of current therapy and future directions of this field.