Radiation, cytokines and T-cell checkpoints: can we cure metastatic cancer?

Miller et al. discuss the clinical findings of a pilot study investigating the combination of stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) and interleukin-2 (IL-2) in patients with advanced melanoma and renal cancer performed by our group (1). The authors discuss our work in the context of anti-tumor efficacy and toxicity of T-cell checkpoint antibodies including anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD1. We treated our first patient with SBRT and IL-2 in 2009. There have been remarkable and practice-changing discoveries in cancer immunotherapy since that time summarized in Table 1, and many more are anticipated to follow in the near term.