Immunotherapy: A Promising Cancer Therapy

Alaa Khalid Said, BS Pharm, PharmD مايو 27, 2024

Overview ㅡ Our immune system keeps us protected from many threats such as infectious bacteria, viruses, and cancer too. However, cancer cells have their own ways and tricks to skip our defense system. Immunotherapy helps the immune cells to overcome these tricks and destroy cancer cells, which makes it a promising approach to treating cancer despite traditional therapy such as radiation and chemotherapy.

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Figure (1)
Traditional therapy vs. Immunotherapy.

Why do we need immunotherapy?

As we mentioned before, our immune cells can take off cancerous cells unless these cells figure out a way to cheat and skip the immune system. Cancer cells can change the tumor microenvironment in nearby tissue so that it’s hostile to immune cells, as well as give off substances that keep the immune system from finding and attacking them. But not all the blame is on the cancer cells; our defense system sometimes has limitations, which could be:

  • Cancer starts in normal cells, so sometimes the immune system doesn’t see the cancer cells as foreign.
  • Sometimes the immune system recognizes the cancer cells, but the response might not be strong enough to destroy them.

So, the need for immunotherapy is to stimulate or boost the natural defenses of our immune system so it works harder and smarter to find and attack cancer cells.

Types of immunotherapy

There are many types of immunotherapy used in cancer treatment. Such as:

  • Checkpoint inhibitors: they work by releasing a natural brake on our immune system. It lets immune cells, called T cells, recognize and attack tumors.
  • Adoptive Cell-Based Therapy: these are natural or engineered versions of our own immune cells, which include:
    • Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) 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.
    • Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL): they’re a special type of white blood cell that has infiltrated a tumor in your body. TIL therapy takes these immune cells from inside the tumor. It grows them in large numbers and then puts them back into the body.
  • Cancer vaccines: like all vaccines, work by training your immune system to defend your body against possible threats. Cancer vaccines are made to either prevent or treat cancer.
  • Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs or MoAbs): these are man-made versions of immune system proteins. MoAbs can be very useful in treating cancer because they can be designed to attack a very specific part of a cancer cell.

Which cancers can immunotherapy treat?

Cancers with markers that the immune system can recognize could be treated well with immunotherapy. Here are some examples:

  • Cancers with many genetic changes: they are a good target for immunotherapy as they don’t look like normal cells. example, melanoma, lung cancer, and some types of colon cancer.
  • Cancers with high levels of PD-L1 expression: PD-L1 is a protein made by some cancer types and shuts down immune system response. Cancers with this protein expression are good candidates for immunotherapy drugs such as pembrolizumab and nivolumab (Opdivo).
  • Cancers with certain markers on their surface: the surface marker CD19 on B cell leukemias is an example of such markers that help CAR T cells recognize target cancer cells.

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Alaa Khalid Said, BS Pharm, PharmD

مرسلة بواسطة Alaa Khalid Said, BS Pharm, PharmD

A Pharmacist with 7 years of experience in oncology practice as a Senior Pharmacist at Tanta Cancer Center, with a PharmD professional degree in clinical practice.

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