Benefits of Immunotherapy from advances in immunology and recombinant DNA technology.

Immunotherapy is a form of medical treatment intended to stimulate or restore the ability of the immune system to fight infection and disease. This can be by inducing, enhancing, or suppressing an immune response. Immunotherapies designed to elicit or amplify an immune response are classified as activation immunotherapies, while those that reduce or suppress immune response are suppression immunotherapies. Active immunotherapy has been effective against agents that normally cause acute self-limiting infectious disease. However, a more effective immunotherapy for chronic infectious diseases or cancer requires the use of appropriate target antigens; the optimization of the interaction between the antigenic peptide, the antigen-presenting cells (APC) and the T cell; and the simultaneous blockage of the negative regulatory mechanisms that impede immunotherapeutic effect. Furthermore, passive immunotherapy using monoclonal antibodies and receptor FC-fusion proteins has come of age and has shown great clinical success. Several monoclonal antibodies, including unmodified antibodies and antibodies armed with toxins or radionuclides, have been approved to prevent allograft rejection or to treat autoimmune diseases and cancer. Several others are in clinical trials.
Preventive vaccines have been successful against infectious agents such as viruses, which cause self-limiting diseases that are normally followed by long-lasting immunity. However, it has taken recent insights into the nature of the relevant cells, cytokines and signalling pathways that both positively and negatively regulate immune responses to make progress in the immunoprevention and immunotherapy of established chronic infections with agents such as retroviruses, mycobacteria and parasites as well as headway for cancer.