Cellular immunotherapy for cancer. Past, present, future

Excerpt

The notion that immunocompetent cells, contained within adult bone marrow or peripheral blood, are capable of mediating an antitumor effect was first validated experimentally in 1957 by Barnes [1]. In these experiments, leukemic animals that were lethally irradiated and reconstituted with allogeneic marrow had a lower tumor burden following transplantation than similarly treated animals that were reconstituted with syngeneic marrow. This immunologic antitumor effect of donor lymphocytes was called Graft versus Leukemia- effect [2]. The observations in animal models led clinical investigators by the late 1960s to speculate that leukocyte transfusions could mediate antitumor effects in cancer-bearing recipients. Mathé et al. [3,4] transfused pooled white cell products into patients with leukemia and Nadler and Moore [5] transfused into cancer patients lymphocytes from therapeutic donors who had been inoculated with the patient’s tumor cells, which resulted in responses. …