Objective To summarize advances in immunotherapy for gastric cancer.Method The relevant literatures about immunotherapy for gastric cancer in recent years were reviewed.Results Recently, the immunotherapy for the tumors mainly included the immune checkpoint blocking, tumor vaccine, and adoptive immunotherapy. There were many studies on the immune checkpoint blocking, mainly targeting the antibodies of programmed death receptor 1 (PD-1) and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4). A series of studies had shown that the pembrolizumab was effective in the patients with advanced gastric cancer who expressed PD-1 ligand positive. The nivolumab had become the first immune checkpoint inhibitor approved for the treatment of advanced gastric cancer in Asia, and the patients with mismatch repair defects could benefit more from the PD-1 treatment. Although the CTLA-4 targeted immune checkpoint blocking therapy had been reported, some studies had found that the patients with advanced gastric cancer didn’t benefit from the treatment of CTLA-4 monoclonal antibody ipilimumab. The tumor vaccine therapy in the gastric cancer had been reported. Due to the high heterogeneity of tumor cells in the gastric cancer, the tumor vaccine efficacy of autoantibody was not stable, based on the high- throughput sequencing of neoantigens identification and screening process was complex, the vaccine preparation needed the longer period, how to individualized screening the neoantigen, and the selection of antigens that could effectively activate the T cells to recognize and kill the tumor cells still needed to be overcame.Conclusions Tumor immunotherapy has received worldwide attention. Anti-PD-1 and its ligand as representative immune checkpoint statin therapy in treatment of advanced gastric cancer has showed great potential, but at present there are still many problems need to be solved, such as number of applicable patients of immunotherapy is small, curative effect of immune checkpoint inhibitor screening index also is not clear, tumor vaccine and adoptive cell therapy are promising but there is lack of evidence from clinical research data, combined use of existing treatments and immunotherapy on curative effect still needs more clinical trials to explore.

Citation： HUANG Libin, CHEN Haining, YANG Tinghan, YU Yongyang. Advances in immunotherapy for gastric cancer. CHINESE JOURNAL OF BASES AND CLINICS IN GENERAL SURGERY, 2019, 26(7): 779-784. doi: 10.7507/1007-9424.201905121 Copy