June Is Cancer Immunotherapy Month

Let’s Help The Cause By Talking About It - It Works

Cancer immunotherapy is one of the most promising cancer treatments at the moment. New breakthroughs are expected in a matter of years. But, if we want this to happen, we must raise awareness on the topic, because scientists need more people joining test stages of the treatment, to extrapolate valuable data.

The Transformation Of Cancer Treatment

 How can our immune system fight against the perils that manage to infiltrate our bodies? This central topic of immunology has elevated gravity today as we confront the COVID-19 pandemic. When the body is challenged by various pathogens, the inherent immune system initiates a series of actions to recognize the specific molecules and uprise a defense against the intruders.

“Raising our own immune system to battle cancer has transformed treatment,” says Dr. Shyamali Singhal, surgical oncologist and founder of H&B. “After years of dedicated research to discover how the immune system works, scientists can now use this knowledge to treat cancer—and they’re declaring to be at the beginning stages of that process.”

We celebrate Cancer Immunotherapy Month every June, to support a general awareness of the field of cancer immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy has been a true game-changer in cancer therapy. Not like other treatments that target cancer cells directly, and often kills healthy cells at the same time, immunotherapy targets your body’s immune system.

Immunotherapies Don’t Work For All Varieties Of Cancer

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer therapy that utilizes the body's innate barriers to identify, attack, and destroy cancer cells. The main objective of the treatment is to engage any cell that it regards as harmful or strange. New information about immunotherapy and its interplays with cancer is creating new methods of treatment. It does not work for every cancer type or every patient, but it has worked for many of them.

The treatment works by shaping your immune system to unleash its defense upon cancer cells. Some treatments may incite your immune system so it can properly engage cancer cells while additional immunotherapy treatments include giving you synthetic immune system proteins or other immune system elements.

Today’s immunotherapies don’t work for everyone or for all varieties of cancer. Less than a dozen immune-based remedies are approved at the time. Across all cancers, checkpoint inhibitors work only about 25 percent of the time. And the current CAR-T therapies work only for blood cancers, like leukemia and lymphoma, not the typical solid tumors tied to most cancer deaths.

Elements Of Immunotherapy

When it comes to cancer immunotherapy, much of the focus has been on the adaptive immune system, especially the T cell that is able to precisely target and eradicate tumor cells. But in some ways, these adaptive immune responses may not be achievable without the innate immune system, which primes and establishes the stage for the adaptive reply of the immune system. ­­

These are the elements of immunotherapy:

• Monoclonal Antibodies. This is an assorted group, also known as MABs, work by sticking themselves to cancer cells, so they make it easier for the patient’s body to recognize them as strange.

• Cytokines. The most prominent cytokine is interferon. Interferons are naturally occurring proteins made by the cells of the immune system. While they do not directly kill cancerous cells, interferons do modulate how the immune system responds to a threat, cancer or otherwise.

• Cancer Vaccines A relatively new idea, a cancer vaccine works along the same lines as vaccines for smallpox or the flu, the idea behind a cancer vaccine is to “fool” a patient’s immune system into thinking it is suffering a malignancy—even though, in the case of preventive vaccines, it may not be, versus therapeutic vaccines, where it is.

• Adoptive Cell Transfers Still quite new, the most hope-inducing adoptive cell transfer technology, CAR T-cell therapy, is a means by which a patient’s T-cells are harvested and genetically superintended in line to better attempt and destroy cancer that has so far avoided discovery. These synthetic T-cells can persevere in the body for years, defending against cancer’s return.

• Oncolytic Virus Therapy The idea of injecting a virus into a previously sick patient can be unsettling, but this type of immunotherapy is already being used to tackle melanoma, the most virulent form of skin cancer. A genetically mutated virus is put into a tumor, where it invades the constituent cells and begins to make duplicates of itself, causing the infected cell to eventually burst and die.

• BCG Short for Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, this technology is now utilized to deal with bladder cancer. Similar in idea to oncolytic virus therapy, this technology uses a bacterium instead of a virus. A vulnerable form of the same bacteria that causes tuberculosis is inserted into the bladder, causing an immune response against the cancer cells.

Scientists Need Our Help In Research

Most experts assume that future immunotherapy breakthroughs will require a combined approach.

“Scientists believe that the most promising new advance could be the development of combination immunotherapies and targeted therapies. For instance, CAR-T cells coupled with checkpoint inhibitors or oncolytic viruses or NK cells,” says Dr. Singhal. The other main issue will be studying when immunotherapy can be applied in frontline evidence rather than being kept for salvage strategies.

But this means more clinical tests and the need for many more trial participants. Currently, only around 5 percent of people with cancer join these studies.

“Scientists need patients to help by enrolling in clinical trials,” says Dr. Singhal. “The quicker scientists can finish the studies, the faster they can get new immunotherapies to become the standard of care.”

This is why it’s so important to raise awareness of Immunotherapy.