Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors and Cellular Treatment for Lymphoma Immunotherapy.

Malignant lymphoma (ML) is the common hematological malignancy with many subtypes. Patients with ML usually underwent traditional treatment failure and become relapsed or refractory (R/R) cases. Recently, immunotherapy like immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) and cellular treatment has gradually emerged and applied into clinical trials with encouraging achievements for ML treatment, which exerts anti-tumor activity by blocking the immune evasion of tumor cells and enhancing the attack ability of immune cells. Targets of immune checkpoints include programmed cell death-1 (PD-1), programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1), cytotoxic T-lyphomocyte associated protein 4 (CTLA-4), T-cell immunoglobulin and ITIM domain (TIGIT), T-cell immunoglobulin-3 (TIM-3) and lymphocyte activation gene 3 (LAG-3). Examples of cellular treatment are chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) -T cells, cytokine-induced killer (CIK) cells and natural killer (NK) cells. This review was aimed to present the current progress and future prospects of immunotherapy in lymphoma, with the focus on ICIs and cellular treatment.