IL2 based immunotherapies: towards a personalized and curative antitumor response

In his commentary, Claus Garbe described our study on the combination of radiotherapy (RT) and the immunocytokine L19-IL2 in the F9 fibrosarcoma model (1) and discussed our work in a checkpoint inhibitor related context. The author is positioning interleukin-2 (IL2) based immunotherapies in the so-called ‘age of the checkpoint inhibition’ and concluded that the role of IL2 and/or L19-IL2 should preferentially be examined in patients not responding to checkpoint blockade, since these patients are not able to develop specific cytotoxic T cell responses. Therefore, IL2 based immunotherapeutic approaches might circumvent this problem by activating the innate immune response against the tumor (2).