Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most common malignancies threatening women’s health worldwide, with a mortality-to-incidence ratio of 15%. Even though, in recent years, vast arrays of treatment options have been introduced and developed for BC management, the outcomes have been unsatisfactory. In the last two decades, treatment with immunotherapy has expanded rapidly with promising hopes and outcomes. The purpose of this review is to explore some immune checkpoint markers promoting antitumor activity and discuss the emerging therapeutic modalities of immunotherapy in different types and subtypes of BC.

From literature reviews, targeted treatment was first brought to patients with BC in 1998, following the discovery of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Of note, for a long time, BC was thought to be non-immunogenic or to have low immunological biomarker expression. In essence, recent studies reveal that a number of breast cancer patients express programmed death protein 1 ligand (PD-LI), which has revolutionized the care and management of several BC types, and subsequently, accumulated results regarding immunogenicity and immune response in BC have led to the development of different modalities of immunotherapy. and given hope to millions of patients with early-stage as well as advanced BC, particularly in combination with other neoadjuvant therapies including chemotherapy, radiation, and hormonal therapy.

The therapeutic effects of immunotherapy in certain subtypes of BC have been observed to be promising, but there is still a capacity for improvement as new strategies in immuno-oncology fields are in progress. This will provide a broader way of studying the value of immunotherapy in BC in the future, with more details on the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), the most invasive and strong cancer with a poor prognosis.

Prof. Dr. Husham Bayazed is now a Consultant Immunologist at the College of Health Sciences, Cihan University, Duhok, Kurdistan Region, Iraq. He is interested in clinical Immunology, Immuno-oncology, and Autoimmunity and has published more than 25 papers in reputed journals in the United States, Europe, Asia, the ESMJ of the WHO, and etc.

Has been serving as a scientific reviewer of many local and international medical journals in addition to being a Fellow of the International Society of Chemotherapy, Infection, and Cancer (ISC). Moreover, being an Immunology Advisory Board Member of EUROMDnet, Membership of the World Stroke Organization, Membership of Metabolomics (USA), and Membership of the American Association of Science and Technology