How is immunotherapy used to treat cancer?
Immunotherapy is a treatment that uses certain parts of a person's immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. This can be done in several ways:
-
Stimulating or strengthening the natural defenses of the immune system so that it seeks out and attacks cancer cells more vigorously or more efficiently
-
Making substances in the laboratory that are similar to components of the immune system and using them to help restore or improve the way the immune system finds and attacks cancer cells
In recent decades, immunotherapy has become an important part of the treatment of some types of cancer. New immunotherapy treatments are being tested and approved, and new ways to work with the immune system are being discovered at a very rapid rate.
Immunotherapy works better for some types of cancer than for others. It is used alone to treat some of these cancers, but for others it seems to work better when used with other types of treatment.
What is the function of the immune system?...Read more.
Types of immunotherapy
Some immunotherapy treatments help the immune system stop or slow the growth of cancer cells. Others help the immune system destroy cancer cells or keep cancer from spreading to other parts of the body. Immunotherapy treatments can be used alone or in combination with other cancer treatments.
-
Immune checkpoint inhibitors: These drugs take the brakes off the immune system, helping it identify and attack cancer cells.
-
Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy: In this therapy, some T cells are taken from a patient's blood, mixed with a special virus that makes the T cells learn to attach to tumor cells, and then the cells are returned to the patient so they can find the cancer , join him and eliminate him.
-
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 usually stimulates parts of the immune system to treat certain types of cancer.
-
cancer vaccinesVaccines are substances that are injected into the body to initiate an immune response against certain diseases. We generally think of them as being given to healthy people to help prevent infection. However, some vaccines can help prevent or treat cancer.
-
Monoclonal antibodies: are proteins of the immune system artificially manufactured in the laboratory. mAbs can be very useful in cancer treatment because they can be designed to attack a very specific part of a cancer cell.
-
Oncolytic viruses: This treatment uses viruses that have been modified in a laboratory to infect and kill certain tumor cells.
