Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that uses the power of the body’s immune system to prevent, control and destroy cancer. From vaccines to prevent cervical and liver cancer to first-line treatments that prolong the lives of patients with metastatic melanoma, immunotherapy has made significant advances in many types of cancer. Each type of cancer is unique, but immunotherapy and immunosuppressive drugs affect each cancer differently.

Explore immunotherapy by cancer type to discover the different types of treatment, why immunotherapy is important, and how to support cancer immunotherapy research.

Immunotherapy is a treatment that uses parts of the body’s immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. This can be done in several ways:

It stimulates or enhances the immune system’s natural defenses, making it harder or smarter to find and attack cancer cells.

Create materials in the lab that mimic the immune system and use them to restore or improve the way the immune system recognizes and attacks cancer cells.

In recent decades, immunotherapy has become an important part of the treatment of certain types of cancer. New immunosuppressive therapies are being developed and approved, and new ways of working with the immune system are being discovered rapidly.

Immunotherapy works better for some types of cancer than others. For some types of cancer, it can be used alone, but for other types of cancer, it seems to work better when used with other types of treatment.

What is the role of the immune system?

Your immune system is a collection of organs, specialized cells, and substances that help protect you from infections and certain diseases. Bacteria that cause infections are protected by the body’s immune cells and substances. It may prevent cancer in some ways.

The immune system controls everything in the body. Any new substance that the immune system does not recognize triggers an alarm that attacks the immune system. For example, microorganisms contain certain protein-like substances that are not normally found in the human body. The immune system thinks they are “foreign” and attacks them. The immune response destroys foreign substances such as bacteria or cancer cells.

However, it is difficult for the immune system to attack cancer cells. Because cancer often starts when healthy cells mutate or get out of control. Cancer cells originate from normal cells, so the immune system does not always recognize them as foreign cells.

Although many people with healthy immune systems still develop cancer, the limits of the immune system’s ability to fight cancer are clear.

Sometimes, the immune system does not see cancer cells as foreign cells because they are not made of normal cells.

Sometimes, the immune system detects cancer cells, but the response may not be enough to destroy the cancer.Cancer cells themselves can release substances that prevent the immune system from recognizing and attacking them.

To overcome this problem, researchers have found ways to enhance the immune system’s response to recognize and destroy cancer cells. Thus, with the help of science, your body can successfully get rid of cancer.

Types of cancer immunotherapy

There are several main types of immunotherapies used to treat cancer, many of which are under research. For more information about immunotherapy as a treatment for specific types of cancer, select your cancer type.

Checkpoint inhibitors: These drugs essentially shut down the immune system, helping it recognize and attack cancer cells.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy: This therapy takes some T cells from the patient’s blood and mixes them with a special virus that teaches the T cells how to attach to cancer cells. Patients can detect, treat and kill cancer.

Cytokines: This treatment uses cytokines (small proteins that carry messages between cells) to stimulate immune cells to attack the cancer.

Immunomodulators: This group of drugs often boosts parts of the immune system to treat certain types of cancer.

Cancer vaccines: Vaccines are substances injected into the body to stimulate the immune system to fight certain diseases. We usually think of giving it to healthy people to prevent infection. But some vaccines can help prevent or treat cancer.

Monoclonal antibodies (mAb or MoAb): These are man-made copies of immune system proteins. Monoclonal antibodies are very useful in cancer treatment because they can be designed to attack very specific subpopulations of cancer cells.

Oncolytic virus: This treatment uses laboratory-modified viruses to infect and kill specific tumor cells.

Reference

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