Abstract
Due to the vague symptomatology of the disease and a lack of effective screening methods, most patients with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) present late in their disease. Despite advances in chemotherapeutic agents, the prognosis of these patients has uniformly been extremely poor. Although cisplatin-based chemotherapy regimens induce responses in most of these patients, the patients invariably experience disease progression or relapses. In an attempt to improve the treatment outcome using a different therapeutic approach, immunotherapy was investigated nearly 20 years ago. Many tumor antigens that are potentially suitable for specific immunotherapy were identified, and many immunotherapeutic approaches were attempted. However, although some responses were observed, the results from clinical studies were generally disappointing. Recent advances in immunoengineering and successes observed among patients treated for refractory/relapsed hematologic malignancies have rekindled the interest to revisit specific cellular immunotherapy in EOC. In this review, we provide the rationale for immunotherapy of EOC, discuss the results of some of the historical studies on the use of cellular immunotherapy in EOC, outline the principles of modern immunoengineering that could be applied to treat the disease, and propose the re-evaluation of the cancer-testis antigen, Sperm protein 17, for targeting by using modern immunoengineering technology.