Recent studies have underlined the close link between immune response and prognosis of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). Immune response understanding combined with biotechnology progress of the last years has allowed development of immunotherapy strategies in CRC. Immunotherapy strategies are divided in "active" or "passive" strategies (patients immune system stimulation or not) and considering the activation of antigen specific immune response or not. These immunotherapy strategies are well tolerated and induced cellular and humoral response correlated with clinical response. Many monoclonal antibodies targeting signalisation pathways or angiogenic growth factors have demonstrated their efficacy in CRC. Multiple vaccine strategies, using different tumour associated antigens, have demonstrated a biological efficacy but with poor clinical results. Results are more promising in adjuvant setting but need to be confirmed by randomized trials. Adoptive immunotherapy with transfer of tumour associated antigen specific T cell is probably the most promising strategy. Actually, except monoclonal antibodies, immunotherapy is not used in clinical practice in CRC due to the lack of results and absence of standardisation.
Keywords: adoptive immunotherapy; antibodies; colorectal cancer; cytokines; tumor vaccination.