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Cancer and the immune system: an overview

Oncogene volume 27, page 5868 (2008)Cite this article

The roots of cancer immunology lie in the work of some of the most influential immunologists of the last 100 years. The year 2008 sees the centenary of the birth of immunology itself, marked by the award of the Nobel Prize to Elie Metchnikoff and Paul Ehrlich in 1908 (Kaufmann, 2008). Around this time, Ehrlich put forward a hypothesis that the immune system might control tumours. The origins and progress of cancer immunology, and its associated high and low points, has been reviewed in depth, highlighting the development of ideas from Ehrlich and Medawar through to the cancer immunesurveillance hypothesis of Burnet and into the era of cellular and molecular immunology (Dunn et al., 2002). The Oncogene review articles collected here provide a glimpse at how several of the concepts of cancer immunology currently stand.

As all students of immunology should know, the immune system works essentially by discriminating self from non-self. This enables the detection and elimination of the smallest viruses and the largest multicellular parasites. Non-self is discriminated from self by fundamental differences in biochemistry, such as the arrangement of carbohydrate residues on glycoproteins or the absence of methylated cytosine residues in DNA. These differences are detected by the numerous pattern receptors, which are a hallmark of the innate immune system. These pattern receptors include the Toll-like receptors, the subject of a recent Oncogene review issue (O'Neill, 2008). The activation of innate immunity leads to the efficient priming of adaptive immune responses mediated by B and T cells. These cells carry antigen receptors and, through education and cooperation, can distinguish self from non-self antigen and trigger subsequent events. However, tumour cells are self in origin and their biochemistry and behaviour differs only subtly from their healthy counterparts. This requires the detection of altered self.

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  1. Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Leeds, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Leeds, UK

    G E Blair

  2. Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    G P Cook

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  1. G E Blair
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Correspondence to G E Blair.

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Blair, G., Cook, G. Cancer and the immune system: an overview. Oncogene 27, 5868 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/onc.2008.277

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