Advances in Immunotherapy for Cervical Cancer

ZENG Wan-qin; YIN Xia; DI Wen

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1674-1870.2017.06.019

Abstract：Closely related to human papilloma virus (HPV), cervical cancer is one of the most common gynecological malignancies that threatens women′s health. With the development of molecular biology and immunology, immunotherapy has become a new treatment modality for cervical cancer. HPV vaccines have already achieved remarkable effect in prophylaxis against cervical cancer. Many studies are exploring the safety and efficacy of immunotherapy in advanced, metastatic and recurrent cervical cancer which has dismal prognosis with conventional surgery and chemoradiation. Medications like recombinant vector vaccine ADXS11-001, anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody Nivolumab and Pembrolizumab are showing promising anti-tumor activity in preliminary clinical trials. At present, researches mainly focus on immunotherapy in concurrent with standard therapy or as adjuvant therapy in locally advanced cervical cancer, mono-immunotherapy or in combination with angiogenesis inhibitor or another immune agent in metastatic and recurrent cervical cancer, and developing novel HPV prophylactic vaccine. This paper briefly reviewed the progress of immunotherapy for cervical cancer from several aspects including vaccine immunotherapy, adoptive cell therapy, immune checkpoint inhibitor and dendritic cell immunotherapy.