Our immune system fights various diseases throughout our lives for most of us. A healthy immune system can fight diseases like cancer. When we get sick, a healthy immune system attacks the disease and helps us be healthy again. Immunotherapy, also called biotherapy, is a type of cancer treatment that strengthens and restores the body’s natural defenses to fight cancer. This treatment uses material produced by the body or advanced material in the laboratory to improve the immune system and its functions to locate and destroy cancer. Immunotherapy is a developed type of treatment.
Immunotherapy modulation immune system
You can only find some types of proteins in certain cancer cells. Without these proteins, cancer cells cannot survive, and with their help, tumors invade a healthy part of the body. Immunotherapy destroys cancer without disturbing a healthy part of the body. Immunotherapy begins with collecting and selecting special cells found in the blood and are called dendritic cells or DC and cytokine-induced killer cells or CEC.
Dendritic cells display substances produced by cancer cells, and they are shown to cells of the immune system to initiate the destruction of cancer cells. DC and CEC cells are taken from the blood to fight cancer cells. This system exists by nature in a healthy organism, but the number of DC and CEC cells is not enough for the organism to fight against malignancy. After a few days of adjusting and training DC and CEC cells in the laboratory to fight cancer successfully. These cells are returned to the body by injection. When DC cells are found in the body again, they interact with T cells and B cells to recognize the life-sustaining proteins of cancer cells previously shown to them in an artificial environment.
These cells are taught in the laboratory and in the artificial environment to recognize the weak point of cancer cells. This recognition allows T cells and B cells to destroy cancerous cells.
Immunotherapy research
Some research has gone in another direction. With the help of certain enzymes, which, when injected directly into the tumor, burn proteins necessary for tumor development and its progression and thus perform a type of local chemotherapy that does not affect the rest of the body.
Scientists have also used these same enzymes to remove a protein coat in the laboratory that prevents immune system cells from recognizing what a cancerous cell actually is and presenting them as they actually are to immune system cells. After this training, the immune system cells return to the body to teach the rest of the body what the cancer cells they need to destroy actually look like. This is an up-and-coming program, also called a cancer vaccine, and is currently under development, and research is ongoing.
Advantages of immunotherapy
When the immune system is activated and modified, it can destroy and reach parts of the body that could never be reached by surgery. The immune system can also destroy the microscopic sites where metastases are located. Immunotherapy also does not activate the division of cancer cells and the action of cancer, which is defended by increasing its activity, as is the case with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Immunotherapy works in a targeted way without damaging the tissue around the tumor. While with classical treatment methods, we have a repressive effect on the immune system through various radioactive isotopes, immunotherapy actually develops it, improves it, and teaches us to fight against certain diseases.
PD-1 immunotherapy should also be mentioned. PD 1 or translation into our language programmed cell death is indicated by apoptosis of T cell hybridomas. PD-1 is a type of T-cell activation receptor. PD1 has two ligands: PD-L1 and PD-L2. There are many PD-L1 blockers on the surface of the tumor, which, when they bind to PD-1, disable and disable the immune system to recognize the tumor as a foreign body and attack it.
By inhibiting the PD-1 / PD-L1 bond and thus isolating the negative signals that control T cells’ action, the immune system response is automatically improved. Pd-1 and PD-L1 inhibitors play a significant role in the treatment of cancer.
This type of immunotherapy is mainly used to treat lung cancer, melanoma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, liver cancer, breast cancer, rectal cancer, ovarian cancer, head, and neck tumors.
These are some of the PD-1 / PD-L1 inhibitors
