Principles and Practice of the Biologic Therapy of Cancer - Hardcover

Rosenberg, Steven A.; Rosenberg, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0781722721 ISBN 13: 9780781722728

Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2000

Synopsis

National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Provides scientific background and practical information required to understand and apply developments in the field. Designed to present state-of-the-art information to both research scientists and clinicians involved in development and application of new cancer treatments. Previous edition: c1995. DNLM: Neoplasms--therapy.

About this title

From The New England Journal of Medicine:

In a 1987 editorial accompanying two reports on the use of interleukin-2 for treating advanced cancer, John Durant, after several calls for caution, concluded that perhaps we were at the end of the beginning of the search for successful immunotherapy for cancer (N Engl J Med 1987;316:939-941). Fifteen years later, the third edition of Principles and Practice of the Biologic Therapy of Cancer illustrates the extraordinary development that has taken place in the field but also, as underlined by the variety of therapeutic approaches still being investigated, demonstrates that biologic therapy is still in its infancy and that there is no clear avenue to the discovery of effective biologic therapies for cancer. The development of modern immunotherapy has greatly benefited from basic laboratory discoveries during the past decade. New cytokines have been identified and are being used in clinical trials, alone and in combination with chemotherapy. Tumor-specific and tumor-associated antigens have been characterized and used as targets for initiating immune responses to cancer. Monoclonal antibodies against tumor-associated antigens, such as HER-2/neu or CD20, have been approved for use in patients with breast cancer and lymphoma, respectively. Supported by the graft-versus-leukemia effect of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, novel techniques for the transfer of anticancer cytotoxic cells are under investigation for use in solid tumors. An improved understanding of the biology of dendritic cells, the "professional" antigen-presenting cells, has given a boost to the development of anticancer vaccines by forcing us to ask the following questions: Against what antigen should patients be immunized in order to reject their tumor? How should this immunity be induced? And will such immunization be clinically useful? The use of various antigenic preparations such as whole tumor cells, cell lysates, proteins, and peptides, whether they are loaded ex vivo on dendritic cells or injected in vivo with the use of various vectors or adjuvants, requires intense experimental and clinical work. The book provides a comprehensive review of all these matters. Each section is introduced by chapters covering basic principles and preclinical studies of cytokines, transfected cells, monoclonal antibodies, and anticancer vaccines. These introductions are followed by chapters on clinical trials that offer the reader a view of the state of the art of a given biologic approach. Two sections on gene therapy and antiangiogenic therapy complete the core of the book. The book is therefore an indispensable resource for researchers and clinicians who want to know the status of a biologic approach to the treatment of cancer. In addition, the references following each chapter are up to date and quite exhaustive. The fact that the book is multiauthored has the drawback of introducing great heterogeneity among the chapters. The decision to focus on therapeutic agents rather than on diseases does not generally allow an integrated view of the management of a disease. The section on evolving approaches is short, consisting of only three chapters. An effort to recommend therapeutic guidelines for diseases in which biologic therapy has proved to have some efficacy -- such as melanoma, renal-cell cancer, and hematologic cancers -- would have been useful for the clinical oncologist. A willingness of the authors to venture bets on the future of the various approaches analyzed in the book would have added some excitement for the reader. It seems that biologic therapy is still in its infancy, but this comprehensive textbook provides a good appraisal of the imagination, the technology, the science, and the clinical work that are being brought together with the aim of reaching a breakthrough in what may yet become the fourth major type of anticancer therapy. Wolf H. Fridman, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright © 2002 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0781722721
• ISBN 13: 9780781722728
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 916