Immunotherapy is a type of treatment that works by stimulating the immune system to fight against cancer.
Our immune system is geared to attack anything that looks foreign or different to our normal cells. Cancer cells have abnormal molecules on their surface that act like “antennas” and can alert our immune system to their presence. One of the ways cancer cells avoid attack by the immune system is by putting extra signal molecules or “white flags” on their surface to fool the immune cells into thinking they are harmless and to leave them alone. Cancer cells can also avoid attack from the immune system by “camouflage” or hiding from it. They do this by limiting the abnormal antennas on their surface. In this way they escape recognition by the immune system. The most important immunotherapy treatments that we have today are called “immune checkpoint inhibitors”. These work by blocking the cancer cells from putting up the “white flags”. This allows the immune system to recognise these abnormal cancer cells and attack them. Another group of immunotherapy treatments, called “therapeutic anti-cancer vaccines”, work by alerting or “priming” the immune system to the abnormal cancer cells so that it can still recognise the abnormal cancer cell and attack it. One of the newest immunotherapy treatments works by modifying the patient’s own immune cells. This is known as “adoptive T-cell therapy”. In this treatment, the patient’s immune cells are collected and “taught” in a laboratory to be able to recognise and attack cancer cells. The modified immune cells are then re-infused back into the patient. Click on image below to enlarge.
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