Abstract
Cancer progression is accompanied by a severely impaired immune system. Nevertheless, for several decades the scientific community remained skeptical of the potential of immunotherapy as a therapeutic strategy. In recent years, such skepticism has diminished significantly as clinical evidence increasingly demonstrates the effectiveness of manipulating the immune system to treat a variety of established tumors. Among components of the immune system, natural killer (NK) cells have been shown to play an important role in immune surveillance against cancer. Many transplantation studies show that NK cells are involved in relapse protection supporting the therapeutic potential of NK cells in tumor eradication. Early studies focused on adoptive transfer of autologous NK cells. However, more recent studies suggest that allogeneic NK cells may be more effective by promoting a higher frequency of normal and fully functional NK cells that are less inhibited by patient tumor. Despite these encouraging findings, NK cell therapy is limited by the lack of antigen specificity and by tumor escape likely resulting from the formation of a complex network of suppressive components in the tumor microenvironment. The class I MHC-dependent and MHC-independent receptors found on the NK cell surface may explain this phenomenon. This chapter reviews and discusses advances in the understanding of human NK cell function in healthy volunteers that have led to translational strategies to treat cancer patients.
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Sarhan, D., Miller, J.S. (2019). Natural Killer Cells: What Have We Learned?. In: Perales, MA., Abutalib, S., Bollard, C. (eds) Cell and Gene Therapies. Advances and Controversies in Hematopoietic Transplantation and Cell Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54368-0_10
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