Immunotherapy

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Immunotherapy is treatment that uses certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. This can be done in a couple of ways:

  • Stimulating, or boosting, the natural defenses of your immune system so it works harder or smarter to find and attack cancer cells
  • Making substances in a lab that are just like immune system components and using them to help restore or improve how your immune system works to find and attack cancer cells

Immunotherapy Plan

There are many drugs available to treat cancer. A doctor who specializes in treating cancer with medication is called a medical oncologist. This type of doctor will prescribe your chemotherapy. You may receive a combination of drugs, because this sometimes works better than one drug by itself.

The drugs, dose, and treatment schedule depend on many factors. These include:

  • The type of cancer

  • The stage of the cancer. Cancer stage is determined by the size and location of the tumor and whether or not the cancer has spread, tumor size, its location, and if or where it has spread.

  • Your age and general health

  • Your body weight

  • The possible side effects of each drug. If a drug causes you to have too many side effects, this can also change your treatment plan.

  • Any other medical conditions you have

  • Previous cancer treatments

Types of Immunotherapy

There are several main types of immunotherapy used to treat cancer:

  • Checkpoint inhibitors: These drugs basically take the ‘brakes’ off the immune system, which helps it recognize and attack cancer cells.
  • Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy: This therapy takes some T-cells from a patient’s blood, mixes them with a special virus that makes the T-cells learn how to attach to tumor cells, and then gives the cells back to the patient so they can find, attach to, and kill the cancer.
  • Cytokines: This treatment uses cytokines (small proteins that carry messages between cells) to stimulate the immune cells to attack cancer.
  • Immunomodulators: This group of drugs generally boosts parts of the immune system to treat certain types of cancer.
  • Cancer vaccines: Vaccines are substances put into the body to start an immune response against certain diseases. We usually think of them as being given to healthy people to help prevent infections. But some vaccines can help prevent or treat cancer.
  • Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs or MoAbs): These are man-made versions of immune system proteins. mAbs can be very useful in treating cancer 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 lab to infect and kill certain tumor cells.

Immunotherapy Planning

Even if immunotherapy is recommended, it is difficult to predict whether it will work as the rate of success varies greatly. To work out if immunotherapy is an option for you, your doctor will consider:

  • the type and stage of cancer
  • your treatment history
  • your future treatment options
  • your overall health

Immunotherapy Duration

Like most other cancer treatments, immunotherapy usually takes a while to work, so you and your family may experience anxiety waiting to see whether you’ll respond to the treatment. If it does work, you may worry about how long immunotherapy will control the cancer or whether the cancer will come back. 

In the adjuvant therapy setting, clinical trials are investigating 1 year of immunotherapy and the optimum duration needed to invoke an appropriate immune response in other settings may also be less than 2 years.