Immunotherapy

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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.

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.
• Research in this area is at an early stage and vaccines are mainly available as part of clinical trials.

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.

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