Immunotherapy for recurrent ovarian cancer: a further piece of the puzzle or a striking strategy?

Introduction:Treatment of ovarian cancer has been long standardized with the inclusion of surgery and chemotherapy based on platinum and taxanes, this strategy reaching high remission rates. However, when this treatment fails, further options are available with little benefit. Since ovarian cancer has specific immunologic features, actually immunotherapy is under evaluation to overcome treatment failure in patients experiencing recurrence.Areas covered:Immunogenicity of ovarian cancer and its relationship with clinical outcomes is briefly reviewed. The kinds of immunotherapeutic strategies are summarized. The clinical trials investigating immunotherapy in recurrent ovarian cancer patients are reported.Expert opinion:The results of these clinical trials about immunotherapy are interesting, but little clinical benefit has been achieved until now. For this reason, we could conclude that immunotherapy is quite different from other treatment options and it could change the global approach for recurrent ovarian cancer treatment. However, to date only fragmentary findings are available to define the real role of immunotherapy in this setting.