Abstract

Traditionally, anti-cancer treatments mainly focus on chemotherapies, radiation therapy and surgery. However, these treatments are limited in terms of their specificity for targeting only cancer cells. DNA damaging chemotherapy is one of the most common treatment modalities of cancer. Current progress of targeted therapy that relies on DNA damage response (DDR) in cancer offers a vast therapeutic window by specifically targeting DDR functions in patient specific tumours. Recent developments in immunotherapy – therapy that boosts the body’s immune system to fight against cancer cells, have shown promising results. Currently, different approaches of immunotherapies such as cytokine, antibody, oncolytic virus, adoptive cell transfer therapies or cancer vaccination have made significant progress in treating different cancer types. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the recent developments of drugs targeting DDR and various immunotherapeutic approaches, with specific focus on the anti-CD19 CAR-T cell therapy. Finally, the paper will give a perspective on future directions of DDR therapy, CAR-T cell therapy as well as the combination of different cancer therapies for effective cancer treatment regime.

Over the past few years, the decipher of different DNA damage response mechanisms enables the development of novel inhibitors for cancer treatment. Furthermore, recent advances in genomic editing technologies and scientific discoveries reveal important roles of the immune system in the context of cancer development. This also prompts the plethora of drug developments that have vast potential in the treatment of different types of cancer diseases. This paper will give an overview of recent drug developments in chemotherapeutic agents targeting DNA damage response as well as recent immunotherapies that have been successful in the treatment of human cancers. The contents discussed in the paper are summarized in (Fig. 1).