Cancer immunotherapy – treatments that restore or enhance the immune system's ability to fight cancer – has achieved remarkable clinical results in multiple cancers over the past few years, generating a large amount of interest in this therapeutic modality.
An improved understanding of the immune response to cancer, as well as patient selection and biomarker development, has increased the number of patients who benefit from immunotherapies. However, although response rates and response durability have greatly improved with approved immunotherapeutic agents, a high percentage of patients fail to respond or progress. Combinatorial immunotherapy approaches are therefore likely to be the most viable strategy for improving responses and outcomes for patients. Such approaches may involve synergistic combinations of immunotherapy agents or combining immunotherapy agents with conventional cancer treatments such as radiotherapy or targeted therapy.
Using a selection of recent full-text articles and chapters from the Springer Nature portfolio, this themed collection explores the biological rationale in support of various combinatorial immunotherapy approaches. In addition, this collection provides an overview of progress in the synergistic design of immune-targeting combination therapies and highlights the challenges involved in tailoring such strategies to provide maximal benefit to patients. Over time this collection will be enhanced by the addition of specially commissioned articles and resources that provide further guidance to healthcare practitioners, as well as selected full-text articles sourced from other prominent publishers.