Acquired resistance for immune checkpoint inhibitors in cancer immunotherapy: challenges and prospects

Xunrui Chen¹, Wenhui Zhang², Wenyan Yang³, Min Zhou⁴, Feng Liu¹

¹Department of Oncology, Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 201900, China
²Shanghai Institute of Precision Medicine, Shanghai 200125, China
³Medical Center, Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 201900, China
⁴Department of Respirtory Medicine, Jinshan Branch of the Sixth People’s Hospital of Shanghai, Shanghai 201599, P.R. China

* Equal contribution as co-first author

Received: July 19, 2021Accepted: December 29, 2021Published: January 17, 2022

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203833

Copyright: © 2022 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Drug resistance has become an obstacle to the further development of immunotherapy in clinical applications and experimental studies. In the current review, the acquired resistance to immunotherapy was examined. The mechanisms of acquired resistance were based on three aspects as follows: The change of the tumor functions, the upregulated expression of inhibitory immune checkpoint proteins, and the effects of the tumor microenvironment. The combined use of immunotherapy and other therapies is performed to delay acquired resistance. A comprehensive understanding of acquired drug resistance may provide ideas for solving this dilemma.