Immunotherapy drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors work by blocking checkpoint proteins from binding with their partner proteins. This prevents the “off” signal from being sent, allowing the T cells to kill cancer cells. One such drug acts against a checkpoint protein called CTLA-4.

Medicines known as monoclonal antibodies can be designed to target these checkpoint proteins. These drugs are called immune checkpoint inhibitors (or just checkpoint inhibitors). Checkpoint inhibitors don't kill cancer cells directly. They work by helping the immune system to better find and attack the cancer cells, wherever they are in the body.

Preliminary clinical findings with blockers of additional immune-checkpoint proteins, such as programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1), indicate broad and diverse opportunities to enhance antitumour immunity with the potential to produce durable clinical responses.

2015年4月13日 · These immune checkpoint pathways, which normally maintain self-tolerance and limit collateral tissue damage during anti-microbial immune responses, can be co-opted by cancer to evade immune destruction.

2020年5月28日 · Immune checkpoint blockade therapy has become a major weapon in fighting cancer. Antibody drugs, such as anti-PD-1 and anti-PD-L1, demonstrate obvious advantages such as broad applicability...

Immune checkpoint blockade is able to induce durable responses across multiple types of cancer, which has enabled the oncology community to begin to envision potentially curative therapeutic approaches.

This therapy is sometimes called immune checkpoint blockade because the molecule that acts as a brake on immune cells — the checkpoint — is blocked by the drug. Our researchers have played a leading role in developing checkpoint inhibitors and demonstrating their safety and effectiveness in cancer patients.

New principles emerged that distinguished immune checkpoint blockade from traditional cancer therapies. First, a new category of side-effects, so-called “immune-related adverse events” (irAEs), was recognized and characterized, leading to algorithm development for early detection and management.

2021年12月22日 · Key milestones for US regulatory approvals of pre-immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) immunotherapeutics — interferon-α (IFNα), bacillus Clamette–Guérin (BCG) and IL-2 — and for ...

In sharp contrast, immune checkpoint blockade focuses on the termination of immune responses by inhibiting immune suppressor molecules. It thus prevents the termination of immune responses or even awakes those CTLs that became exhausted during an immune response.