What Is Cancer Immunotherapy?
Cancer immunotherapy is a brand-new way to fight cancer by enabling your body’s immune system to better recognize and destroy cancer. Think of it as teaching your immune system to do a better job — to become more adept at recognizing, targeting and killing cancer cells.
Unlike chemotherapy or radiation, which harm healthy cells along with cancerous ones, immunotherapy for cancer is more targeted and precise.
As a result, this approach has revolutionized cancer treatment, providing new hope to patients — especially those whose cancers failed to respond to conventional therapies. Immunotherapy is not a single treatment but a group of therapies designed to support or boost the immune system in various ways. Check point Inhibitors, CAR-T Cell Therapy, Cancer Vaccines There are many well-recognized types such as checkpoint inhibitors, CAR-T cell therapy, and cancer vaccines.
How does this work?
The immune system is evolutionarily hard-wired to shield the body from potentially lethal pathogens like viruses and bacteria. But cancer cells are wily — they develop ways to evade immune cells or shut down the immune response completely.
That’s why immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer helps out the immune system, by making it easier to recognize and beat those ruses. Let’s take a look at how the most common kinds of immunotherapy work:
Checkpoint Inhibitors – Taking the Brakes Off the Immune System
For starters, the immune system comes with a fleet of “checkpoints” that shield the body’s healthy cells from attack. Unfortunately, most cancer cells also make use of these checkpoints to evade discovery.
Checkpoint inhibitors are drugs that release those “brakes,” and in so doing, enable the immune system to more effectively attack the cancer. For example, Keytruda (pembrolizumab) is one of the most well-known drugs in this class. It takes aim at an immune-cell checkpoint protein called PD-1, which helps immune cells recognize and kill cancer.
Types of Cancer Treated with Checkpoint Inhibitors:
- Melanoma (skin cancer)
- Non-small cell lung cancer
- Certain types of lymphoma
- Bladder cancer
- Kidney cancer
These drugs have been game changers in oncology, with long-lasting benefits and even remission for some.
CAR-T Cell Therapy – Supercharging Your Immune Cells
And then there’s CAR-T cell therapy, a newer breakthrough in late-stage cancer treatment. In this approach, the patient’s T cells (a type of immune cell) are extracted and genetically modified in the laboratory to help them recognize and kill cancer, then reinfused.
Those “supercharged” T cells can go on to track down and kill cancer cells more specifically.
CAR-T Cell Therapy Is Commonly Used for:
- Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), especially in children
- Certain types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma
- Multiple myeloma
While so far not commonly used against solid tumors, CAR-T is a significant advance for the treatment of aggressive blood cancers that have not responded to other forms of treatment.