Immunotherapy: A New hope for Women with Breast Cancer

According to the National Cancer Institute, breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women in the United States. Each year, there are about 200,000 women who learn that they have the disease. Breast cancer in men is rarer but about 1,700 annually are diagnosed with this illness.
After 70 years and millions spent, it seems as if modern research has finally found the cure to breast cancer. Immunotherapy has been around for quite a time now but credit for the first researches goes to a team from the National Institute of Health. The results during this time were already promising, but were also limited to one type of cancer. Thanks a new wave of technological advancements, new equipments and processes have been developed, and have paved the way for advanced immunotherapy for prostate and breast cancers.
Also known as adoptive cell transfer, immunotherapy uses the body’s own defense system to fight the cancerous tumors. In the past, the team at NIH extracted tumor infiltrating T-lymhocytes (TILs) from the patient’s cancerous tumor. These TILs are then enhanced with cancer fighting properties which are cultured in the laboratory. These cancer fighting cells are then put back into the patient and targets specific antigens (MART-1) that cause the tumor to regress. Unfortunately, in most patients TILs could not be harvested so they had to be engineered in the laboratory.
That same year, fifteen patients who had skin cancer underwent immunotherapy. In 2008, Robert Highfield of Telegraph UK reported that one of the recipients of the clinical trial, now a 52-year old man, has been pronounced as completely healed from metastatic melanoma. The testing conducted by NIH was still in its early stages then and was designed only for patients who have advanced skin cancer.
From that breakthrough, new researches have been funded and the same approach is being used to deal with other types of cancers such as that of the prostate and breasts. Also, a new kind of immunotherapy has been developed. Instead of using TILs, researchers have hand-picked white blood cells to fight specific cancers. The best results were derived from researches which used anti-cancer cells taken from the body of the patients themselves.
The problem with engineering T-cells was that as the tumors became more advanced; they become invisible to manufactured anticancer cells since these are developed only for a certain stage. Normal antibodies evolve at the same time as the cancer cells, so these are best used to fight tumors. Unfortunately, the body does not have enough of them; hence it is unable to effectively cause cancer regression. Through immunotherapy, T-cells are cultivated and “instructed” to kill the tumor cells.
35 years ago, 75% of women who were diagnosed with breast cancer died after five years. Today, 90% of women with breast cancer are more likely to survive their disease for more than five years. With immunotherapy, there’s even greater hope for these women to be completely healed.
We’ve all watched cancer movies and have seen documentaries of cancer patients. We’ve seen how chemo can negatively affect them. Immunotherapy has changed the lives of many patients who have undergone clinical trials. By now, we should realize that immunotherapy is the only respite for suffering cancer patients. Thankfully larger, more elaborate testing are now underway, and could pave the way for a commercialized cure for cancer.

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