Natural killer cell based immunotherapies as cancer therapeutics

Natural killer (NK) cells are known to target cancer cells. Since conventional cancer therapeutics including chemotherapy and radiotherapy remain unsuccessful to completely cure the cancer, there has been increasing demand of immunotherapies to treat cancer. In past few years there has been NK cell-based immunotherapies showed promising results. But, decreased NK cell cytotoxicity has been documented in cancer patients both in peripheral blood and tumour microenvironment. Advances in understanding of anti-tumour immune responses and cancer biology have revealed a complex dynamic interaction between the immune effectors and the tumour cells. Therefore, because of defects in cancer patients’ NK cells, utilizing healthy allogeneic NK cells should be selected as cancer immunotherapeutic.