Personalized cancer immunotherapy

Personalized cancer therapy is a treatment strategy where interventions are tailored to individual patients based on their unique characteristics. While traditionally personalized approach pertains to targeted therapies that inhibit oncogenic drivers of a given tumor, the same principals can be applied to immunotherapies that harness the antitumor potential of a patient's immune cells. For instance, immune checkpoint inhibitors can be highly effective in a subset of patients. However, the majority of tumors are intrinsically resistant. The challenges of personalized immunotherapy are to identify patients who will benefit from checkpoint inhibitors and to find rational alternative treatments for those who will not. This chapter summarizes clinically-approved and promising emerging biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint inhibitors. We also describe key principals of highly personalized immunotherapies designed for a given individual that may emerge as an alternative immunotherapy option for immune checkpoint blockade-unresponsive patients.