Immunotherapy+Treatment

Immunotherapy Treatment Immunotherapy, or also called biotherapy, is treatment that uses certain parts of the immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. Two ways that this treatment is commonly done is (1) stimulating your own immune system to work harder or smarter to attack cancer cells; (2) giving your immune system components, such as man-made immune system proteins.

When the immune system is able to work correctly, it can shrink or stop growing with patients with the best results. It really doesn't depend on the type of cancer, all that matters is that the immune system does its job. Even though they've only been able to find drugs that help patients with breast cancer, kidney and lung cancer, and patients with melanoma, doctors think this could be the start of a new era. According to Doctor Drew Pardoll, this period of testing and discovering immunotherapy will be viewed as an inflection point, a moment in medical history when everything changed.

Dr. Renier J. Brentjens, an expert of leukemia at Memorial Sloan-Kettering center, exclaims that this is a "game changer" for cancer treatment. They are now beginning preliminary test in combing other treatments with new immunotherapies to better improve test results. Immunotherapy drugs just help the immune system do its job to fight off cancer cells, just like antibiotics do to help fight off bacteria and germs. They way that the immunotherapy came about is that they tried to figure out how cancer cells were attacking normal cancer cells. It turns out that the cancer cells were using the body's own brakes. Brakes usually help the immune system shut down after it's job of killing the virus off was finished. These brakes usually use a molecule like [|PD-1]. The PD system showed researchers how cancer cells can elude destruction. This discovery then led to the idea about a drug that could cover up some of the PD molecules on the cancer cells to help the immune system.

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 * Immunotherapy has now become an established treatment strategy.
 * From 2009 to 2012, [|abstracts at major] [|conferences] have doubled
 * "There are approximately 800 ongoing clinical trials in various phases for cancers such as breast, colon, head and neck, and kidney"

"State of Cancer Immunotherapy." //Fight Cancer With Immunotherapy//. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. Kolata, Gina. "Breaking Through Cancer's Shield." //The New York Times//. New York Times, 14 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.