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Conclusion & Future Perspective
Immunotherapies hold great promise for future treatments of autoimmunity, cancer and infectious diseases. Classical vaccination is the oldest and probably most successful immunotherapy; it is also the most efficient public health measure against infectious diseases. Rapidly emerging antibiotic resistance, especially of Gram-negative bacteria, represents an enormous medical and socioeconomic challenge of the near future. The gradual loss of effective antibiotics is a serious threat to the very existence of modern medicine as we know it today. Thus, alternative strategies are sorely needed. We should therefore start to utilize our expanding knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of innate immune responses to design novel antimicrobial immunotherapies. The obvious risks of immunotherapies, including autoimmunity, autoinflammation and consecutive organ damage, have to be taken very seriously and remain the major obstacles on the road to clinical applications. Thus, despite the urgency of the situation, it is absolutely essential to identify specific ligands and responding signaling pathways that can mediate host protection while sparing healthy tissues. In order to maintain immunological homeostasis, antimicrobial immune responses are tightly scaled to the level of infectious threat. Identification of molecular switches to manipulate the immunological risk assessment machinery may be the key to successful adjuvant immunotherapies of infectious diseases.
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