This therapy gets your body to fight the cancer off itself.
When you’re sick, it’s a routine process to get an appointment with your doctor to help figure out what’s wrong. If you’re fighting something like a bacterial infection, you might turn to antibiotics to help with your treatment and effectively eliminate your symptoms. Prescription medications are personalized to a certain extent, based on what ails you, your medical history, and the size of your body. Beyond this, however, what one person is taking to help cure something like strep throat is similar to what the next patient is.
A new step is taking medicine further, however, when it comes to cancer with an expectation of producing more effective results.
Personalized cancer treatments
Cancer treatments abound from radiation, to chemotherapy, stem cell treatments, pills, and more. One of the disease’s newest frontiers involves getting a patient’s own immune system to tackle the invasive and destructive disease. The goal of immunotherapy in cancer is to use an approach that controls the patient’s own immune system in a way that gets rid of the cancerous growths and prevents their spread.
Related: Bitten? Why Mosquitoes Find Some People Irresistible
According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, immunotherapy drugs work well for some cancer patients but not all. This approach has a response rate of about 15% to 20%. As a form of precision medicine, however, it can be quite effective.
How personalized cancer medicine works
Essentially, personalized immunotherapy treatments for cancer patients help to retrain the patient’s own cells to attack the cancerous growth. Experts search for key biomarkers in a patient that characterize what’s going in on their tumor. These can be markers found in DNA profiles, as well as RNA, protein, or metabolomic information and they’re specific to each tumor. A patient might have a DNA sequence examined or tests done that search for protein levels or gene fusions. Some immunotherapy treatments involve targeting just one genetic mutation and others look at several at once.
Biomarker tests are typically liquid biopsies that test your bodily fluids for these indications of cancer cells. Two types of these tests are currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Cancer tumors typically thrive by causing your immune system to put on the breaks. When treatments are developed from the results of testing for biomarkers, they re-activate the patient’s natural response to cancer as an invader and get their immune system to fight it off.
New approaches
The key is to block immune checkpoints that matter for a patient’s given tumor. Pharmaceutical companies are said to now be studying how to block numerous checkpoints at one time, allowing the human immune system to ramp up its response and rid the body of all cancer without the need for harsh treatments like chemotherapy. It’s important for clinicians to be able to understand exactly how the immune cells in a patient’s body are interacting with the patient’s system in order to apply a personalized solution.
Many patients have responded well to this type of therapy but sometimes it has serious side effects. A list of these side effects can be found here.
For more on cancer treatments, click here.
photo credits: Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Shutterstock.com
