Question: What types of immune therapies are there?

Max Jamilly answered on 12 Mar 2018:

Great question! Cancer immunotherapy is a HUGE field but the general idea is using the body’s own immune system to find and kill cancer cells. There are two main strategies for doing this: active or passive immunotherapy.

The immune system normally works by finding cells which look ‘foreign’ and killing them. All cells have special signatures on their cell membrane called antigens which help to identify the cells. When a pathogen (bad thing) like a bacterium infects the body, the immune system detects the unfamiliar antigens on the bacteria and starts an immune response to find, kill and remove all the bacteria. The immune system matches each antigen to an ‘antibody’ that helps it remember all the different pathogens it fights.

Tumours in the body put the immune system on high alert because they release special growth chemicals into the blood. In PASSIVE immunotherapy, we can help the immune system to find cancer cells by giving the patient an extra dose of antibodies.

But the immune system isn’t always very good at finding tumours. Cancer cells come from inside the body so they don’t always look ‘foreign’ to the immune system. Nonetheless, cancer cells do have a different pattern of antigens to normal cells. In ACTIVE immunotherapy, we can ‘train’ the immune system in several really clever ways to spot the cancer antigens and kill the cancer cells.