Abstract—Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy are the three core modalities of traditional cancer treatment, demonstrating definitive efficacy in early-stage tumor therapy. However, their effectiveness is often limited for advanced, metastatic, and recurrent refractory tumors, while presenting challenges such as significant trauma, susceptibility to drug resistance, pronounced toxic side effects, and high recurrence rates. Tumor immunotherapy has become the fourth pillar of cancer treatment following traditional therapies, by activating and reshaping the body’s own immune system to achieve precise recognition and efficient elimination of tumor cells. This paper focuses on immune checkpoint inhibitors and Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, providing a systematic review of the molecular mechanisms, drug development history, current clinical applications, efficacy characteristics, and safety issues of these two technologies. It conducts a comparative analysis across multiple dimensions, including mechanisms of action, applicable tumor types, response characteristics, adverse reactions, and accessibility, while also outlining the key bottlenecks and future development directions currently facing this field. Studies have shown that immune checkpoint inhibitors can significantly prolong overall survival in patients with various solid tumors, achieving long-term survival benefits; CAR-T cell therapy has achieved breakthrough remission effects in relapsed or refractory hematologic malignancies. However, issues such as insufficient efficacy in solid tumors, widespread occurrence of immune resistance, poor controllability of treatment toxicity, high treatment costs, and limitations in individualized preparation remain major challenges that hinder widespread clinical application. This article can provide references for clinical treatment strategy selection, basic research direction planning, and translational medical research.
 
Keywords—cancer immunotherapy, immune checkpoint inhibitors, Programmed cell Death protein-1 (PD-1) / Programmed cell Death ligand 1 (PD-L1), Cytotoxic T-Lymphocyte-Associated protein-4 (CTLA-4), Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy

Cite: Tian Yuan, "Review on the Development History and Research Progress of Cancer Immunotherapy: From Immune Checkpoint Inhibition to CAR-T Cell Therapy," International Journal of Pharma Medicine and Biological Sciences, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 43-47, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).