In recent days, immunotherapy is gaining
increasing attention among the research circle. Cancer is still the top killer
that deprives lives of many people. Against such backdrop, the advent of
immunotherapy naturally catches the eyes of the public.
Immunotherapy, as its name suggests, works
by boosting the body's natural defenses to fight diseases like cancer. Substances
made by the body or artificially in a laboratory may be used to improve or
restore immune system function when needed. In this sense, immunotherapy is
also called biologic therapy.
Numerous studies have been made as to how
effective immunotherapy may be in treatment. It turns out that immunotherapy
itself has never let down the people who holds tremendous hope for it. Positive
signs have been detected. Yet, you may not know what types of immunotherapyare. Actually immunotherapy could be classified into several categories based
on their own mechanism of action.
Monoclonal antibodies
Antibodies are a kind of proteins that are
produced automatically by the immune system when something foreign is detected
in the body. Made in labs, monoclonal antibodies often have two roles. First,
they could be used as a targeted therapy to block an abnormal protein in a
cancer cell. Second, they could also be used in immunotherapy. We know that
cancer cells can easily avoid the detection of the immune system in most cases,
but by attaching to certain proteins on cancer cells, some monoclonal
antibodies makes cancer cells nowhere to hide and eventually killed by our
powerful immune systems. Other antibodies might work by releasing the brakes on
the immune system so that cancer cells can be killed. PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors
belong to this category.
T-cell therapy
T cells are a kind of very important immune
cells that is potent in fighting infection. How does the T-cell therapy work?
There are basically two steps. First, some T cells are removed from a patient’s
blood. Second, some alterations are made on the cells using laboratory
techniques so they have specific proteins called receptors. The role of receptors
is vital as they allow those T cells to recognize the cancer cells. The changed
T cells are sent back to the patient’s body after being grown in large numbers
in the laboratory. And they start to destroy cancer cells immediately once they
arrive. This type of therapy is what we call CAR (chimeric antigen receptor)
T-cell therapy.
Cancer vaccines
Vaccine is another method that could be used
to help the body fight disease by exposeing the immune system to an antigen.
This enables the immune system to recognize and finally destroy that antigen or
related materials. Based on different functions, vaccines can be differentiated
as prevention vaccines and treatment vaccines. Neoantigen
peptide vaccines that are individual-specific are very promising and may
possibly open a new door for cancer immunotherapy.
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