When someone gets the devastating news that they have cancer, their mind often goes to the treatments they’ll go through. In the past, that was usually either radiation or chemotherapy or perhaps both. While chemotherapy and radiation can help treat cancer, they can also come with difficult side effects.
As a result, for decades, researchers have been working on better options.
For example, breast cancer chemotherapy is no longer the automatic standard of care for this particular diagnosis. There are other options, like targeted therapy and immunotherapy. Immunotherapy can be used to treat a number of cancers aside from breast cancer, and below, we talk more about what it is and how it works.
An Overview
Immunotherapy is an approach to treating cancer that helps your own immune system fight the cancer, and it’s categorized as a biological therapy. Biological therapies use substances from living organisms as a treatment for cancer.
The immune system will typically detect and destroy cells it sees as abnormal.
Despite the fact that the immune system can typically prevent or slow the growth of cancer, cancer cells can evade destruction by the immune system in different ways. For example, cancer might have genetic variations making the cells less visible to your immune system. They can also have proteins on the surface of the cells that turn off your immune cells, or there could be changes in the normal cells around the tumor preventing the immune system from responding.
Immunotherapy helps your immune system function better against cancer.
Which Cancers Can Be Treated by Immunotherapy?
There are quite a few cancers that immunotherapy has been approved to treat, including bladder, breast, cervical, and colorectal cancers. Also treatable with immunotherapy are leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer, among others.
Not all patients who have the cancers that are treatable by immunotherapy are eligible.
A wide range of factors plays a role, including the tumor cells’ genetic makeup, how far the cancer’s advanced, and whether it’s responded to previous treatment.
Types of Immunotherapy
The types of immunotherapy used for cancer treatment include:
- Immune checkpoint inhibitors: These are medications that block immune checkpoints, which are a normal part of your immune system and prevent your immune response from being too intense. When these are blocked, the drugs allow your immune cells to respond better to cancer.
- T-cell transfer therapy: This treatment boosts your T cells’ natural ability to fight cancer. With this type of treatment, your immune cells are taken from your tumor, and then the ones that are most active against your particular type of cancer are chosen or lab-modified to better attack cancer cells. They’re grown and then put back into your body.
- Monoclonal antibodies: These are proteins from the immune system that are lab-made and designed to bind to certain targets on a cancer cell. They might mark a cancer cell, allowing it to be seen better and then destroyed by the immune system.
- Treatment vaccines: For cancer treatment, vaccines work to boost your immune response to cancer cells.
- Immune modulators: These improve your immune response to cancer, and they might generally and broadly affect your immune system, or they could affect a certain part of your immune system.
Immunotherapy is given in different ways, including intravenously, orally, or topically. Some types can also be given directly into the bladder.
How often you receive the treatment and the setting where you receive it depends on the type of immunotherapy, how your body responds and reacts, and the type of cancer you have.
Some people receive treatment every day, weekly, or monthly. Other types of immunotherapy are given in cycles.
How Do You Know If Immunotherapy Is Working?
Finally, immunotherapy is considered effective if someone’s tumor stops growing or shrinks. It can take longer for immunotherapy drugs to work than chemotherapy.
In some cases, a tumor might appear to be getting bigger on scans before it gets smaller, which doesn’t mean the immunotherapy isn’t working. Instead, it can mean that what’s showing up on a scan are immune cells that are attacking the tumor and causing it to look bigger.
There are also signs that can indicate your immune system is being stimulated and therapy is working, such as inflammation.
Along with scans, your doctor might use blood tests to look at tumor markers.
It can generally take a while for immunotherapy medicines to work, and some patients may have a delayed response, while others might feel better immediately. Immunotherapy doesn’t work for everyone, and in that case, a doctor might recommend a patient do other treatments.
