Cancer poses a serious threat to human health and its increasing incidence has made it one of the most common causes of death. Immune factors affect in vivo tumor cell survival and expansion, and cancer patients have obvious cell immune dysfunction and low anti-tumor immunity. TIM-3 can be widely expressed in a variety of immune cells and it affects both innate and adaptive immune response by regulating the function of immune cells, thus affecting tumor occurrence and development. This paper focuses on the TIM-3 regulation of immune cells, and its expression and mechanism in patients with liver, gastric and prostate cancers in order to explore its regulatory mechanism in tumor immunity and provide new ideas and targets for tumor immunotherapy.