Immunotherapy

This article or area is currently under construction and may only be partially complete. Please come back soon to see the finished work! (4/09/2020)

Original Editor - Lucinda hampton

Top Contributors - Lucinda hampton, Kim Jackson and Vidya Acharya  

Introduction

Immunotherapy is the use of drugs (e.g., immunosuppressors), biologicals (e.g., cytokines, monoclonal antibodies), vitamins and minerals (e.g., zinc, vitamin C, and vitamin B6), transplantation (e.g., bone marrow) and immunizations (e.g., prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines) to control immune responses in diverse directions.

Immunotherapy

• Any form of treatment that uses the body's natural abilities that constitute the immune system to fight infection and disease or to protect the body from some of the side effects of treatment.
• Works to upregulate or downregulate the immune system to achieve a therapeutic effect in immunological mediated disorders including: malignancies; immunodeficiencies; hypersensitivity reactions; autoimmune diseases, tissue and organ transplantations; inflammatory disorders; infectious diseases; and any other disease where immunotherapy can improve the quality of life and survival.
• Is also called: Biological therapy; Biological response modifier therapy

Uses

Immunotherapy is used to treat certain types of cancer. It is also used to treat inflammatory diseases eg.:

• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Inflammatory bowel diseases, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease
• Multiple sclerosis
• Psoriasis

Immunotherapy can be used to suppress the immune system. This is particularly helpful in autoimmune disorders when it wrongly attacks normal tissues.

Inflammation (useful for fighting infection) is overproductive in autoimmune diseases and it damages normal tissues. Biological therapies can cool off this harmful inflammation (see DMARDs and BDMARDs).

Types of Cancer Immunotherapy

Monoclonal antibodies (MABs)

• Monoclonal antibodies are made in a laboratory to boost the body’s natural antibodies or act as antibodies themselves.
• Monoclonal antibodies can help fight cancer in different ways. eg can be used to block the activity of abnormal proteins in cancer cells (known as a targeted therapy), or cancer treatment that targets a cancer’s specific genes, proteins, or the tissue environment that helps the tumor grow and survive.

Checkpoint Inhibitors

• Cancer cells can find ways to hide from the immune system by activating these checkpoints.These drugs basically take the ‘brakes’ off the immune system, which helps it recognize and attack cancer cells. Common checkpoints that these inhibitors affect are the PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4 pathways. Examples of immune checkpoint inhibitors are: Ipilimumab (Yervoy); Nivolumab (Opdivo).
• Checkpoint inhibitors are used to treat cancers such as melanoma skin cancer and lung cancer. Researchers are also looking at them in clinical trials for other types of cancer.

Cytokines

• This treatment uses cytokines (small proteins that carry messages between cells) to stimulate the immune cells to attack cancer.
• Cytokines are a group of proteins that are found naturally in the body.
• They help to boost the immune system.
• Man made versions of these proteins have been developed as a treatment for cancer.

Vaccines to treat cancer

• 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.
• Some vaccines can help prevent or treat cancer.
• The HPV and hepatitis B vaccines are preventive vaccines. They work by preventing an infection that might lead to cancer. Viruses, however, do not cause most cancers. The challenge for researchers is to use the model of the immune response to viral infection of cells to develop vaccines for cancers not caused by viruses. ie a therapeutic cancer vaccine that would be used to treat cancer after it has already appeared. There are two main types of such therapeutic vaccines: autologous vaccines and allogenic vaccines.
• Researchers must carefully evaluate which cancers are most suitable for a therapeutic vaccine approach. Generally, the cancers that are the best candidates are those whose treatments are associated with high costs and therapies that are less effective, or therapies that involve the risk of serious side effects for the patient. Cancers such as lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and breast cancer are such candidates for vaccine therapy.
• Much study, insight, and skill will be needed to develop these vaccines.

CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) 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.
• This type of immunotherapy is still quite new and researchers are looking into how well it works as a treatment for cancer.

Oncolytic viruses

• This treatment uses viruses that have been modified in a lab to infect and kill certain tumor cells.

Resources

• bulleted list
• x

or

1. numbered list
2. x