近年来人类免疫系统研究已经出现了前所未有的突破。在二十一世纪，通过增强体液和T细胞免疫的细胞疗法的开发已经成为癌症治疗的重要组成部分。虽然很久以来人们都认为，自然杀伤(NK)细胞在诱导针对肿瘤抗原无关的宿主免疫应答的能力优于T细胞，但自然杀伤(NK)细胞在临床上治疗潜力基本还未开发。越来越多的研究表明，激活和抑制NK细胞，能够增加NK细胞对肿瘤的细胞毒性，增强NK细胞的抗肿瘤免疫能够促进许多药物和基因治疗方法的发展。发表于《自然评论:药物发现》(Nature reviews. Drug discovery)2015年6月的一篇文章，对NK细胞在体外对肿瘤的作用进行综述能力的进步，并提供调查了相关的新的治疗方法和策略，利用NK细胞为基础的肿瘤免疫疗法在临床中具有很大潜力。

        原文摘要：

Therapeutic approaches to enhance natural killer cell cytotoxicity against cancer: the force awakens.

        Scientific insights into the human immune system have recently led to unprecedented breakthroughs in immunotherapy. In the twenty-first century, drugs and cell-based therapies developed to bolster humoral and T cell immunity represent an established and growing component of cancer therapeutics. Although natural killer (NK) cells have long been known to have advantages over T cells in terms of their capacity to induce antigen-independent host immune responses against malignancies, their therapeutic potential in the clinic has been largely unexplored. A growing number of scientific discoveries into pathways that both activate and suppress NK cell function, as well as methods to sensitize tumours to NK cell cytotoxicity, have led to the development of numerous pharmacological and genetic methods to enhance NK cell antitumour immunity. These findings, as well as advances in our ability to expand NK cells ex vivo and manipulate their capacity to home to the tumour, have now provided investigators with a variety of new methods and strategies to harness the full potential of NK cell-based cancer immunotherapy in the clinic.