RESEARCH ARTICLE
Immunotherapies Towards Tumor Initiating Cells and Cancer Stem Cells
Prithi Rajan*, 1, 2, Roopa Srinivasan2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 1
First Page: 1
Last Page: 6
Publisher Id: TOCIJ-1-1
DOI: 10.2174/1876401000801010001
Article History:
Received Date: 01/09/2008Revision Received Date: 11/09/2008
Acceptance Date: 23/09/2008
Electronic publication date: 28/11/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Active immunotherapy of cancer is a promising treatment modality by inducing long lived tumor reactive immune effector cells. Several vaccine trials have indicated that its effectiveness is probably best when the tumor burden is low. An attractive population of cells to target by this approach may be tumor initiating cells (TICs). Recent research suggests that such types of cells may be precursors to cancer possibly giving rise to metastatic disease. Although more work is being done to characterize appropriate phenotypic and functional markers, this population of cells would make an ideal target for active immunotherapy in high risk patients, so as to achieve remission over much longer periods of time. This review gives an overview of the potential of immunotherapy and how it may target TICs as a potential treatment option for cancer patients.