Radiation Oncology/Cytokine therapy

• Cytokine therapies are designed to alter immune homeostasis with the tumor and provoke or disinhibit immune effectors

• Often associated with severe dose-limiting toxicities that are manageable with appropriate dosing and are now better understood to induce immune-suppressive humoral factors, suppressive cells, and cellular checkpoints, without consistently inducing a tumor-specific response

• Cytokines are being investigated clinically with new engineered cytokine mutants (superkines), chimeric antibody-cytokine fusion proteins (immunokines), anticancer vaccines, CPIs, and cancer-directed monoclonal antibodies to increase their antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity or sustain cellular responses and anticancer efficacy

• Michele Ardolino et al. Oncotarget. 2015 Aug 14; 6(23): 19346–19347. Cytokine treatment in cancer immunotherapy (PMID: 26305981)

• Kevin C Conlon et al. J Interferon Cytokine Res. 2019 Jan. Cytokines in the Treatment of Cancer (PMID: 29889594)

• /Interferon alpha (IFNα)
• /High-dose interleukin-2 (HDIL-2)
• /Granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF)
• /IFN gamma (IFNγ)
• /IL-7
• /IL-12
• /IL-21
• /IL-15