The Hopes of Countless Millions
BACKGROUND
What is Cancer Immunotherapy?
Cancer immunotherapy is the treatment of using the immune system to prevent and remove cancer cells. The immune system has the ability to identify and attack cancer cells, which is why cancer immunologists are hoping to discover immunotherapies that can do so.
Why Use Cancer Immunotherapy?
There were 8.2 million deaths due to cancer worldwide in 2012. Therefore, it is one of the leading causes of deaths for people.
In addition, cancer impacts a person on an emotional level. Cancer patients can feel depressed about the changes that cancer provided them with, such as hair loss. This can cause a person to have a lower self-esteem, which can affect their emotional health. Cancer can also have symptoms that cause a patient to suffer, such as fatigue or nausea. Fear of death can bring a cancer patient anxiety and great depression. These feelings can continue endlessly, and an individual may have the risk of developing clinical depression. This will further put the person in agony and impacting the patient’s health.
Thus, using cancer immunotherapy in an attempt to treat cancer can bring people hope and save many individuals with cancer dying and fighting it every moment.
How Does Cancer Immunotherapy Work?
There are many different types of immunotherapies. Some of them include monoclonal antibodies, immune checkpoint inhibitors, adoptive cell transfer, cytokine therapies, and cancer vaccines. These methods
help the immune system fight cancer
effectively.
Click to learn more about the
different types of immunotherapy.
Immunotherapy can be given to a
patient in several ways, including pills,
injections, or intravenous (IV), which is
injected into the body through a vein.
Picture illustrating how immunotherapy drugs function to fight against cancer.
When will Cancer Immunotherapy be Effective?
Immunotherapies have been used in an attempt to treat cancer patients. Some do respond to the treatment and is effective. Unfortunately, there is a group of people who do not respond well or not at all. In addition, cancer immunotherapy works well with only certain types of cancer. Therefore, researchers are searching for an answer to why immunotherapy is not effective for all patients.
A research shows that chemotherapy and radiation is one of the reasons why immunotherapy is ineffective for some patients. Chemotherapy and radiation can produce sub-clones, which are mutations in cancer cells, due to the fact that chemotherapy and radiation have the ability to damage the DNA. Thus, when there are numerous sub-clones, the immune system can not easily identify cancer cells.