Despite the dynamic development of
cancer research, annually millions of people die of
cancer. The human immune system is the major 'guard' against
tumor development. Unfortunately,
cancer cells have the ability to evade the immune system and continue to grow. The proper understanding of the intricate immune response in
tumorigenesis remains the holy grail of
cancer immunology and designing effective
immunotherapy. To decode the immune responses in
cancer, in recent years, proteomics studies have received considerable attention. Proteomics studies focus on the detection and quantification of
proteins, which are the effectors of biological functions, and as such, are proven to reflect the cell state more accurately, in comparison to genomic or transcriptomic studies. In this review, we discuss the proteomics studies applied to characterize the immune responses in
cancer and
tumor immune microenvironment heterogeneity. Further, we describe emerging single-cell proteomics approaches that have the potential to be applied in
cancer immunity studies.