Tumor-Targeted Antibodies

At the end of the nineteenth century in 1894, Dr. Pierre-Paul Emile Roux from the Pasteur Institute in Paris demonstrated the clinical efficacy of serotherapy to treat diphtheria. A century later in 1994, Prof. Ronald Levy from Stanford University, CA, USA, demonstrated that antibodies could also be used to treat cancers. Since then, major improvements have been made in the design and production of antibodies, and they are now part of the conventional therapies of many cancers. More recently, it has been shown that antibodies could also be used to generate adaptive antitumor immunity in patients with cancer, by targeting co-inhibitory receptors expressed at the surface of T cells. The promising results obtained with such immunomodulatory antibodies open many perspectives for synergistic combinatorial strategies between tumor-targeted and immune-targeted antibodies.