A clear picture of the dynamic relationship between the host immune system and cancer is emerging as the cells and molecules that participate in naturally occurring antitumour immune responses are being identified. The interferons (IFNs) - that is, the type I IFNs (IFNalpha and IFNbeta) and type II IFN (IFNgamma) - have emerged as central coordinators of tumour-immune-system interactions. Indeed, the decade-old finding that IFNgamma has a pivotal role in promoting antitumour responses became the focus for a renewed interest in the largely abandoned concept of cancer immunosurveillance. More recently, type I IFNs have been found to have distinct functions in this process. In this Review, we discuss the roles of the IFNs, not only in cancer immunosurveillance but also in the broader process of cancer immunoediting.

The capacity of immunity to control and shape cancer, that is, cancer immunoediting, is the result of three processes that function either independently or in sequence: elimination (cancer immunosurveillance, in which immunity functions as an extrinsic tumour suppressor in naive hosts); equilibrium (expansion of transformed cells is held in check by immunity); and escape (tumour cell variants with dampened immunogenicity or the capacity to attenuate immune responses grow into clinically apparent cancers). Extensive experimental support now exists for the elimination and escape processes because immunodeficient mice develop more carcinogen-induced and spontaneous cancers than wild-type mice, and tumour cells from immunodeficient mice are more immunogenic than those from immunocompetent mice. In contrast, the equilibrium process was inferred largely from clinical observations, including reports of transplantation of undetected (occult) cancer from organ donor into immunosuppressed recipients. Herein we use a mouse model of primary chemical carcinogenesis and demonstrate that equilibrium occurs, is mechanistically distinguishable from elimination and escape, and that neoplastic cells in equilibrium are transformed but proliferate poorly in vivo. We also show that tumour cells in equilibrium are unedited but become edited when they spontaneously escape immune control and grow into clinically apparent tumours. These results reveal that, in addition to destroying tumour cells and sculpting tumour immunogenicity, the immune system of a naive mouse can also restrain cancer growth for extended time periods.

'Cancer immunoediting' is a process wherein the immune system protects hosts against tumor development and facilitates outgrowth of tumors with reduced immunogenicity. Although interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) is known to be involved in this process, the involvement of type I interferons (IFN-alpha/beta) has not been elucidated. We now show that, like IFN-gamma, endogenously produced IFN-alpha/beta was required for the prevention of the growth of primary carcinogen-induced and transplantable tumors. Although tumor cells are important IFN-gamma targets, they are not functionally relevant sites of the actions of the type I interferons. Instead, host hematopoietic cells are critical IFN-alpha/beta targets during development of protective antitumor responses. Therefore, type I interferons are important components of the cancer immunoediting process and function in a way that does not completely overlap the functions of IFN-gamma.

In the absence of adaptive immunity, NK cells polarize M1 macrophages to facilitate cancer immunoediting.

This brief review discusses the role of the immune system in tumor development, covering a history of cancer immunity and a summary of the concept of cancer immunoediting, including its three phases: elimination, equilibrium, and escape. The latter half of this review then focuses specifically on the equilibrium phase, making note of previous work, suggesting that immunity might maintain cancer in a dormant state, and concluding with a description of a tractable mouse model unequivocally demonstrating that immunity can indeed hold preformed cancer in check. These findings form a framework for future studies aimed at validating immune-mediated cancer dormancy in humans with the hopes of devising new, immunotherapeutic strategies to treat established cancer.