ABSTRACT
The field of cancer immunotherapy began in the 19th century with William Coley’s studies injecting live Streptococcus bacilli bacteria and heat-killed bacterial extracts into primary tumors resulting in an induced durable remission of inoperable sarcoma (Burdick, 1937 ; Decker and Safdar, 2009). Fast forward to today where the successful development of CTLA-4 and PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors, along with the recent FDA approval of Kymriah and Yescarta, two CAR-T cell immunotherapies, heralds a new era in cancer medicine.
