Article by Miranda Sudo
What is Immunotherapy?
Immunotherapy uses parts of a person’s immune system to fight diseases, including certain cancers. Normally, when new substances like a bacteria or virus enter your body, your immune system recognizes them as “foreign”. It then attacks the “foreign” cells and destroys them. However, with cancer your immune system doesn’t always recognize the mutated cells as “foreign” for likely one of these reasons:
- Since cancer cells start in normal cells, sometimes the immune system doesn’t see the cancer cells as foreign because the cells aren’t different enough from normal cells.
- Sometimes the immune system recognizes the cancer cells, but the response might not be strong enough to destroy the cancer.
- Cancer cells themselves can also give off substances that keep the immune system from finding and attacking them.
Immunotherapy helps your immune system recognize cancer cells and strengthens its response to destroy them; it can be used in a couple of ways:
- Stimulating the natural defenses of your immune system so it works harder or smarter to find and attack cancer cells
- Making substances in a lab that are just like immune system components and using them to help restore or improve how your immune system works to find and attack cancer cells (“How Immunotherapy Is Used to Treat Cancer”).
Types of Immunotherapy
- Checkpoint inhibitors: Cancer cells can use “checkpoint” proteins to avoid being attacked by the immune system. Checkpoint inhibitors help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells.
- Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy: Takes T-cells from a patient’s blood, changes them in the lab by adding a gene for a receptor which helps the T cells attach to a specific cancer cell antigen, and then gives the cells back to the patient so they can find, attach to, and kill the cancer.
- Cytokines: Uses cytokines (small proteins that carry messages between cells) to stimulate the immune cells to attack cancer.
- Immunomodulators: These drugs generally boost parts of the immune system to treat certain types of cancer.
- Cancer vaccines: Some cancers are caused by viruses, so vaccines that help protect against infections with these viruses might also help prevent some of these cancers. There are also some vaccines that work by stimulating the patient’s immune system to attack the cancer cells.
- Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs or MoAbs): These are man-made versions of immune system proteins. mAbs can be very useful in treating cancer because they can be designed to attack a very specific part of a cancer cell.
- Oncolytic viruses: This treatment uses viruses that have been modified in a lab to infect and kill certain tumor cells (“How Immunotherapy Is Used to Treat Cancer”).
Using Immunotherapy to treat Mesothelioma
Mesothelioma can be difficult to treat because its tumor cells are high in checkpoints, which are proteins that block your immune system’s attack. Currently, only a couple of checkpoint inhibitor drugs are approved to be used as treatment for Mesothelioma. Clinical trials are currently testing different mixes of immunotherapy drugs, as well as the use of immunotherapy to rev up your immune system before cancer surgery. Immunotherapy drugs are given as infusions, so patients receiving them go to a clinic and get an IV drip every 2 to 3 weeks (“How does immunotherapy work”).
Recently researchers at the Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have shown they can eradicate advanced-stage mesothelioma tumors in mice in just a few days with a treatment combining Rice’s cytokine “drug factory” implants and a checkpoint inhibitor drug. Results of the study also suggested that the combination of these two drugs could be effective at training “memory T cells” that can reactivate the immune system to fight mesothelioma if it recurs. The researchers are currently expecting to initiate a second trial for patients suffering from mesothelioma in the latter half of 2023 (Boyd). To learn more about this study, check out the video below.
Cancer fighting ‘drug factories’ show promise in fighting mesothelioma
Resources
Boyd, J. (2022, August 22). ‘Drug factory’ implants eliminate mesothelioma tumors in mice. Rice News | News and Media Relations | Rice University. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/drug-factory-implants-eliminate-mesothelioma-tumors-mice
How does immunotherapy work to treat mesothelioma? WebMD. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.webmd.com/cancer/mesothelioma-immunotherapy#:~:text=Mesothelioma%20treatments%20include%20chemotherapy%2C%20like,cannot%20be%20removed%20by%20surgery.
How Immunotherapy Is Used to Treat Cancer. American Cancer Society. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects/treatment-types/immunotherapy/what-is-immunotherapy.html
