Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that boosts the body’s natural defenses to fight cancer. It uses substances made by the body or in a laboratory to improve how your immune system works to find and destroy cancer cells.
How does the immune system fight cancer?
Your immune system consists of a complex process your body uses to fight illness. This process involves your cells, organs, and proteins. Cancer can commonly get around many of the immune system’s natural defenses, allowing cancer cells to continue to grow.
Different types of immunotherapy work in different ways. Some immunotherapy treatments help the immune system stop or slow the growth of cancer cells. Others help the immune system destroy cancer cells or stop the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body. Immunotherapy treatments can be used alone or combined with other cancer treatments.
There are many types of immunotherapy. They include:
- Monoclonal antibodies and tumor-agnostic treatments, such as checkpoint inhibitors
- Oncolytic virus therapy
- T-cell therapy
- Cancer vaccines
What are monoclonal antibodies and tumor-agnostic treatments?
When your immune system detects something harmful, it makes antibodies. Antibodies are proteins that fight infection by attaching to antigens, which are molecules that start the immune response in your body.
Monoclonal antibodies are made in a laboratory to boost your body’s natural antibodies or act as antibodies themselves. Monoclonal antibodies can help fight cancer in different ways. For example, they can be used to block the activity of abnormal proteins in cancer cells. This is also 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.
Other types of monoclonal antibodies boost your immune system by inhibiting or stopping immune checkpoints. An immune checkpoint is normally used by the body to naturally stop the immune system’s response and prevent it from attacking healthy cells. Cancer cells can find ways to hide from the immune system by activating these checkpoints. Checkpoint inhibitors stop the ability of cancer cells to stop the immune system from activating, and in turn, amplify your body’s immune system to help destroy cancer cells. Common checkpoints that these inhibitors affect are the PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4 pathways.