Advances in Immunotherapy for Cancer Treatment

The article under discussion summarizes the developments in the strategy for cancer treatment and several recent immune therapies including the immune checkpoint inhibitors and the CAR-T cell therapy. These therapies improve the body’s defenses, making it attack and eliminate cancer cells.


Immunotherapy has positively benefited cancer treatment since it offers an individual approach to patients. Immune checkpoint inhibitors directly hinder proteins that help the immune system evade cancer cells while CAR-T cell therapy is a process of altering T cells for better identification and eradication of cancer cells. Issues include side effects and their management, costs issues and issues that arise from defining patient’s eligibility.

Immune therapies have been effective in the treatment of cancer and the results have featured success in treating forms of melanoma, lung cancer and lymphoma among others. This therapy is beneficial to the patients as they experience better chances of survival alongside reduced tumor size. Further research is being conducted to discover new ways through which immunotherapies could be adapted, and patient results could be enhanced.

Author: Carter Winslow

References: Sharma P, Allison JP. Immune checkpoint targeting in cancer therapy: Toward combination strategies with curative potential. Cell. 2015 Apr 9;161(2):205-214. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2015.03.030.

Neelapu SS, Locke FL, Bartlett NL, et al. Axicabtagene ciloleucel CAR T-cell therapy in refractory large B-cell lymphoma. N Engl J Med. 2017 Dec 28;377(26):2531-2544. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1707447.

Wei SC, Duffy CR, Allison JP. Fundamental mechanisms of immune checkpoint blockade therapy. Cancer Discov. 2018 Sep;8(9):1069-1086. doi:10.1158/2159-8290.CD-18-0367.

Previous
Previous

AI in Cancer Prognosis, Prediction, and Treatment Selection

Next
Next

Understanding mRNA Vaccines: Revolutionizing Medicine