Welcome to the Immunotherapy for Cancer site

Immunotherapy, sometimes called biological therapy or biotherapy, is the most natural of all therapies for it utilizes the body’s own immune system to battle disease.
The immune system is the body’s defence against anything that is considered as alien such as germs and cancer cells. In general, we don’t notice how our immune system fights disease every second of our lives. Thus we don’t realize that most sickness and disease that are latent in our bodies has already been fought and defeated before they even manifest into a full blown sickness. Immunotherapy can be of use in a wide variety of treatments even including the simple allergy and even the malignant cancer. Vaccination is a form of immunotherapy. Most of the time, these germs and cancer cells are “nipped in the bud” so to speak before they can even develop into a disease. But if you already have cancer, your body would need all the extra help it can have to battle these rogue cells. Immunotherapy will then be your body’s able partner in combating cancer.
For many years, physicians relegated the power of the immune system only in the combating of various diseases such as virus and infections but not cancer. The history of immunotherapy dates back to the late 1800’s when a New York surgeon Dr. William Coley, suspecting that the immune system would have an impact on cancer induced bacteria on cancer patients. With the invention of radiation and chemotherapy in cancer, immunotherapy research for cancer treatment has been relegated to the background. However, with fresh researches and breakthroughs, immunotherapy is gaining dominance once again in cancer treatments. Years back, immunotherapy has proven to be most effective in treating cancers when they are still at an early phase. But now, recent breakthroughs are being done so that these important advances create greater hopes for immunotherapy to work in cancer cases even if they are already in the malignant stage. Astounding experiments and scientific evidence now point out to the critical if not crucial role of the immune system in curing cancer. Scientific breakthroughs are now being made that make it possible for immunotherapy to condition the body to defeat even malignant tumors.
Immunotherapy can be used alone or even alongside chemotherapy. It is an authoritative weapon which is less toxic and can even reduce the side effects of other treatments. Immunotherapy works by putting in additional immune cells or molecules that increase immune cells and biochemical that will assist the body to fight cancer. The advantage of immunotherapy is that it will target rogue cells but it will have minimal impression on healthy cells thereby lessening the impact of negative side effects. There are however minor side effects of immunotherapy and these include the feeling of nausea, general malaise, fever, flu or flu-like syndromes.
Thus there are two modes of treatment in immunotherapy. One is done by adding immune cells just like adding more reinforcements in a battlefield. In this mode we have the T-cell therapy and the B-cell therapy. By adding T-cells into your immune system, it will be able to recognize tumors and destroy them. There are cases when the T cells themselves are taken from the patient’s tumours and processed so that as they are put back into the patient’s body, they would be more powerful to do the job. In the early stages of bladder cancer, live bacteria is put into the bladder and in two out of three cases, recurrence has been prevented.
Advanced researches has already ventured in T cell genetic engineering by cloning the good soldier cells which came from within the patient’s body and putting them back. This has opened the doors for many breakthroughs and promises a broad range of treatment in various types of cancer.
If you want an immune cell that is deliberately calculated to assail a precise enemy, B-cells can do the job. The B-cell therapy is done by injecting monoclonal antibodies in your system that would go direct into a target battlefield and reinforce the fight against bacteria, viruses and toxins. This is done intravenously. Monoclonal antibodies mean getting a good cell and artificially cloning it many times before it would be induced back to the body. The advantage of monoclonal bodies is that scientists are now able clone various types of cells for various types of cancers. This promises many possibilities and great strides for cancer immunotherapy treatment. For example, many discoveries are being done such as the discovery of the antibody Rituximab which is useful as a cure for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Another breakthrough is the discovery of Trastusumab which is the treatment for breast cancers.
The other mode of treatment is is by strengthening the capacity of your immune system to release more anti- bodies. Biological agents are used to induce the immune system to release more antibodies, regulate the immune system to be more healthy and strong, and strengthen the immune system in general. An example of this is an immune enhancement cream called imiquimod which can be used topically. This is an interferon producer that compels the body’s T-cells to attack warts, cutaneous lymphoma, actinic keratoses, squamous cell cancer, basal cell cancer, and superficial malignant melanoma.
Dendritic cell based immunotherapy
This utilizes dendritic cells which are actually immune cells whose major purpose is to present antigen (antibody generating) material to the body. When antigen is presented to the cells, it would create a reaction among the cells that would constitute an immune response. Dendritic cells are taken from the patient and activated and put back into the patient. Activated dendritic cells would then interact with T cells and B cells and would start the whole process of immune response. These dendritic cells would present these tumor antigens to the body creating a cytotoxic response or the quality of being toxic to cells. The body would then respond by creating an army with which to attack these cancer cells.
Preventive cancer vaccines are also used to strengthen the body’s immune system against certain types of antigen causing cancer.
Another major stride in immunotherapy is the discovery and development of sipuleucel-T. This is an active cellular immunotherapy directed at fighting prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is a common non-skin cancer in the whole world with about one million men having the disease in the United States alone. This is now being reviewed by the FDA and is approaching commercialization. Sipuleucel-T was developed by the Dendreon Company and it operates by conditioning the body’s immune system to recognize prostate cancer cells and annihilate them. In the experimental studies done by Dendreon, all 100 prostate cancer patients responded positively to treatment. At first it seemed that only those who have lesser than malignant prostate cancer responded positively to treatment. Then after two years and a half of observation, even those who have malignant cancer responded positively. Here are some amazing statistics, 34% of those who received treatment in the first trial were still alive after three years compared to 11% of those who took a placebo. Those who took the treatment had the median survival of 25.9 months while those who took the placebo had only 21.4 month. Thus you have 4.5 months increase in survival. The similar trial done on a different product yielded only a 2.5 month benefit. Other findings include that Sipuleucel-T was able to slow the advance of the cancer cells to metastasize. Patients who were administered with Sipuleucel-T gave a ten to one hundred fold higher immune response than those under placebo. As with regards to the safety of its use, the side effects of Sipuleucel-T were only chills, fatigue, and fever. Thus it was found out that Sipuleucel-T could really make a difference in adding more precious and memorable days to one’s life.

Another explanation from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cancer immunotherapy is the use of the immune system to reject cancer. The main premise is stimulating the patient's immune system to attack the malignant tumor cells that are responsible for the disease. This can be either through immunization of the patient, in which case the patient's own immune system is trained to recognize tumor cells as targets to be destroyed, or through the administration of therapeutic antibodies as drugs, in which case the patient's immune system is recruited to destroy tumor cells by the therapeutic antibodies.Since the immune system responds to the environmental factors it encounters on the basis of discrimination between self and non-self, many kinds of tumor cells that arise as a result of the onset of cancer are more or less tolerated by the patient's own immune system since the tumor cells are essentially the patient's own cells that are growing, dividing and spreading without proper regulatory control.In spite of this fact, however, many kinds of tumor cells display unusual antigens that are either inappropriate for the cell type and/or its environment, or are only normally present during the organisms' development (e.g. fetal antigens). Examples of such antigens include the glycosphingolipid GD2, a disialoganglioside that is normally only expressed at a significant level on the outer surface membranes of neuronal cells, where its exposure to the immune system is limited by the blood-brain barrier. GD2 is expressed on the surfaces of a wide range of tumor cells including neuroblastoma, medulloblastomas, astrocytomas, melanomas, small-cell lung cancer, osteosarcomas and other soft tissue sarcomas. GD2 is thus a convenient tumor-specific target for immunotherapies.Other kinds of tumor cells display cell surface receptors that are rare or absent on the surfaces of healthy cells, and which are responsible for activating cellular signal transduction pathways that cause the unregulated growth and division of the tumor cell. Examples include ErbB2, a constitutively active cell surface receptor that is produced at abnormally high levels on the surface of breast cancer tumor cells.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunotherapy