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The Basics of Cancer Immunotherapy pp 115–123Cite as

Combined Immunotherapy with Conventional Cancer Treatments

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Abstract

Novel cancer immunotherapies targeting the immunosuppressive PD-1/PD-L1 pathway result in a durable clinical benefit in a subset of patients; however, primary or acquired resistance is common, affecting up to two-thirds of the patients with various tumor types (Ribas et al., JAMA 315:1600–1609, 2016). Therefore, a substantial effort is currently underway to fully elucidate the mechanisms of resistance to immune checkpoint blockade and to design more effective therapeutic strategies. Conventional anticancer treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and targeted therapy, execute anticancer activity through direct cancer cell killing. Recent appreciation of the immune-regulatory effects of these therapy modalities have led to the exploration of their utilization in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors, aiming to achieve synergetic effects to improve the response and durability of immunotherapy. In this chapter, we will review the immunomodulatory effects of these conventional cancer treatments and their impacts on reshaping modern cancer immunotherapy. The ongoing clinical trials of these combination therapies and their results will be briefly discussed here, since they are also reviewed in other sections of this book. The combination of different immunotherapy agents, such as PD-1 antibody in combination with CTLA-4 antibody, is not a focus here, but is discussed in the overview and other disease-specific chapters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Medical Oncology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

    Yiyi Yan

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  1. Yiyi Yan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urology, Department of Immunology, College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA

    Haidong Dong

  2. Department of Oncology, Department of Medicine/Division of Hematology, Department of Immunology, College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA

    Svetomir N. Markovic

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Yan, Y. (2018). Combined Immunotherapy with Conventional Cancer Treatments. In: Dong, H., Markovic, S. (eds) The Basics of Cancer Immunotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70622-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70622-1_7

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