Recent Advances in T Cell Adoptive Immunotherapy of Cancer

Adoptive cell therapy using cytotoxic CD8(+) T lymphocytes (CTL) has shown promising results in recent clinical trials for cancer patients. Although significant advances have been achieved in this field, there are still many issues that need to be addressed before wide application of adoptive cellular immunotherapy as an adjuvant or mainstream therapy for various cancers. Difficulties related to the ex vivo generation of large number of effective antigen-specific CTLs, their in vivo tracking and short term survival following adoptive transfer are among the barriers decelerating the clinical use of this approach. In this review, we focus on recent developments in adoptive cell therapy using CD8 T cells and discuss the hurdles that need to be overcome. In addition, current status of adoptive cell transfer using other T cell populations for cancer immunotherapy that may circumvent some of the problems related to current protocols of using CTL is also discussed.