Cancer resistance to immunotherapy: What is the role of cancer stem cells?

Immunotherapy is an emerging form of cancer therapy that is associated with promising outcomes. However, most cancer patients either do not respond to immunotherapy or develop resistance to treatment. The resistance to immunotherapy is poorly understood compared to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Since immunotherapy targets cells within the tumor microenvironment, understanding the behavior and interactions of different cells within that environment is essential to adequately understand both therapy options and therapy resistance. This review focuses on reviewing and analyzing the special features of cancer stem cells (CSCs), which we believe may contribute to cancer resistance to immunotherapy. The mechanisms are classified into three main categories: mechanisms related to surface markers which are differentially expressed on CSCs and help CSCs escape from immune surveillance and immune cells killing; mechanisms related to CSC-released cytokines which can recruit immune cells and tame hostile immune responses; and mechanisms related to CSC metabolites which modulate the activities of infiltrated immune cells in the tumor microenvironment. This review also discusses progress made in targeting CSCs with immunotherapy and the prospect of developing novel cancer therapies.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Cancer Drug Resistance

• Publication date

  2022-10-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.20517/cdr.2022.19PMID 36627890PMCID 9771758
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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