Harnessing the immune system to eradicate malignant cells is becoming a most powerful new approach to
cancer therapy. FDA approval of the
immunotherapy-based drugs,
sipuleucel-T (
Provenge),
ipilimumab (Yervoy, anti-CTLA-4), and more recently, the programmed cell death (PD)-1 antibody (
pembrolizumab,
Keytruda), for the treatment of multiple types of
cancer has greatly advanced research and clinical studies in the field of
cancer immunotherapy. Furthermore, recent clinical trials, using NY-ESO-1-specific
T cell receptor (TCR) or CD19-chimeric
antigen receptor (CAR), have shown promising clinical results for patients with metastatic
cancer. Current success of
cancer immunotherapy is built upon the work of
cancer antigens and co-inhibitory signaling molecules identified 20 years ago. Among the large numbers of target
antigens, CD19 is the best target for CAR T cell therapy for
blood cancer, but CAR-engineered T cell
immunotherapy does not yet work in solid
cancer. NY-ESO-1 is one of the best targets for TCR-based
immunotherapy in solid
cancer. Despite the great success of checkpoint blockade
therapy, more than 50% of
cancer patients fail to respond to blockade
therapy. The advent of new technologies such as next-generation sequencing has enhanced our ability to search for new immune targets in onco-immunology and accelerated the development of
immunotherapy with potentially broader coverage of
cancer patients. In this review, we will discuss the recent progresses of
cancer immunotherapy and novel strategies in the identification of new immune targets and mutation-derived
antigens (neoantigens) for
cancer immunotherapy and immunoprecision medicine.