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The most effective treatments for cancer have been surgery and chemotherapy or radiation for decades. But some of these treatments can harm healthy cells, which is why it is important to make progress that harnesses the power of the immune system.
“Some patients have truly remarkable responses to immunotherapy that last for years – in some cases so many years that we think these patients can even be cured of their disease,” says Ezra Cohen, MD of the Precision Immunotherapy Clinic at UC San Diego. Health. This therapy does not yet work for every cancer, but here is the latest:
What is immunotherapy and how does it work?
The immune system normally attacks anything that is foreign to the body, such as viruses and bacteria. But because cancer starts in non-cancerous cells, the immune system does not always see it as dangerous.
“The goal of immunotherapy is to teach the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells,” said Aung Naing, MD, a professor of cancer therapy at the University of Texas’ Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The most common form of immunotherapy for cancer involves the inhibitors of checkpoints, drugs that inhibit the inhibition of an immune response that is already underway, unleashing the full force. With chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, doctors take T cells from a patient’s blood, design them to target the tumor, and send them back to the patient to attack the cancer.
Scientists are also developing vaccines – not just those that prevent cancer, such as the HPV vaccine, but also the immune response. And to promote the assault on cancer, they create monoclonal antibodies, versions of the body’s own antibodies against the body, in the laboratory.
What types of cancer are treated by immunotherapy?
To date, patients with various difficult-to-treat cancers (including melanoma, head and neck cancer, and kidney, bladder, and non-small cell lung cancer) have benefited most from immunotherapy. “These types of tumors are considered ‘warm’ because the immune cells in them can be activated,” says Dr Naing. “They respond well to immunotherapy.”
Other cancers, such as colon and pancreatic cancer and most breast cancers, are considered immunosuppressive or “cold”, but researchers are beginning to achieve success by combining immunotherapy with traditional treatments.
The FDA recently approved the first immunotherapy for breast cancer after a control point inhibitor (called atezolizumab) combined with chemotherapy had significant consequences. It is now a first-class treatment for some women with breast cancer tumors that are triple negative – an aggressive and particularly deadly form of the disease. A monoclonal antibody called pembrolizumab has also been approved, along with chemotherapy for certain types of early-stage triple negative breast cancer.
How effective is immunotherapy?
Researchers are trying to understand why immunotherapy drugs only work for about 20% of cancer patients, and why some patients experience life-threatening complications, while others have virtually no side effects.
Meanwhile, the race continues to develop more treatments. “Immunotherapies have finally been approved for 20 different cancers,” says Dr. Cohen. “This is a sign of a new era of cancer therapy.”
This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue Prevention.
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