Research progress on traditional Chinese medicine intervention in cancer immune escape
Cancer is a key global problem, and its incidence rate and mortality are rising worldwide. According to the data of the Global Cancer Report, the global incidence rate and mortality of cancer will reach 19.29 million and 9.96 million respectively in 2020, and cancer has become the primary problem affecting the life and health of all human beings. Therefore, seeking a new treatment plan that appropriately prolongs the survival of cancer patients is very important. With the continuous deepening of research and interdisciplinary integration, immune escape in immunotherapy has gradually become a research hotspot in cancer. Immune escape, as the third stage of cancer immune editing, plays an extremely important role in the occurrence and development of cancer. Traditional Chinese medicine plays an important role in tumor immunotherapy, which can significantly improve tumor immune suppression and enhance patients’ immune function. Research has shown that traditional Chinese medicine formulas, monomers, and extracts can effectively inhibit the secretion of immunosuppressive factors by tumor cells, reverse tumor cell-mediated immune suppression, and intervene in tumor cell immune escape in various ways. Therefore, this article will elaborate on immune escape and the application of traditional Chinese medicine in cancer, in order to explore new immunotherapy ideas and methods for traditional Chinese medicine treatment of cancer in the future.

Traditional Chinese Medicine believes that the main cause of cancer is the accumulation of pathogenic toxins caused by insufficient righteous qi. Therefore, supporting the body and eliminating evil is the basic principle of traditional Chinese medicine in treating cancer. In the development of cancer, “deficiency of righteous qi” is the root cause of the disease, and “cessation of pathogenic toxins” is the symptom of the disease. The two are mutually causal and ultimately contribute to the occurrence and development of cancer. In clinical practice, commonly used traditional Chinese medicine helps regulate the balance of yin and yang, deficiency of positive qi, and deficiency of qi and blood in the body to promote positive qi, reduce phlegm and soften hardness, enhance the activity of immune cells, effectively identify and timely kill mutated cancer cells, inhibit immune escape of tumor cells, and delay the development of the disease. This article systematically studies the role of immune escape in cancer development based on traditional Chinese medicine theory, and summarizes the role of traditional Chinese medicine in cancer immune escape through various signaling pathways. Existing research has shown that immune escape is closely related to the occurrence and development of cancer, playing an important role in cancer proliferation, invasion, and metastasis. Traditional Chinese medicine has significant effects in clinical adjuvant treatment of cancer, with unique advantages in relieving clinical symptoms, inhibiting cancer metastasis, improving quality of life, and enhancing chemotherapy resistance. But with the continuous deepening of research on traditional Chinese medicine anti-tumor, it has been found that traditional Chinese medicine research still faces some problems. Firstly, in clinical research of traditional Chinese medicine, there is a lack of rigorous design studies, coupled with large individual differences among patients, long clinical treatment cycles, and poor patient compliance, which has brought certain difficulties to the research. Secondly, animal experiments are generally therapeutic experiments, and the method for determining the success of modeling is to randomly select a small number of samples after modeling, but this method does not completely equal the success rate of modeling. Thirdly, due to the fact that the therapeutic effect of traditional Chinese medicine is achieved through multiple targets and links, research on its treatment mechanism needs to be more systematic and integrated. Therefore, future research should be guided by evidence-based medicine theory, with standardized clinical design methods and in vivo and in vitro modeling methods that have high modeling success rates and low mortality rates. More rigorous experiments and clinical trials are needed to decipher the mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine’s anti-tumor immunity.