Chaperones and slow death--a recipe for tumor immunotherapy.

In an exciting recent paper Richard Vile and coworkers describe a novel approach to tumor immunotherapy based on the killing of a population of normal cells within an inflammatory environment. This approach builds on recent studies showing that the molecular chaperone Hsp70 can act at multiple stages during tumor antigen presentation to enhance the generation of CD8(+) T lymphocyte-mediated immunity and lead to regression of primary and metastatic tumors.