Posted on 12/18/2020 8:18:11 PM PST by libh8er
Thank you.
Immunotherapy generally uses something called monoclonal antibodies to allow the immune system to be more effective against a disease.
When I was an undergrad biochemist, way back in the early 80s, we were learning about monoclonal antibodies and there was a lot of hope that they would offer miracle cures for many diseases, including cancer. Took decades to get them working.
It may be possible to find or create them for a while bevy of diseases. In my wife’s case, they used two agents, one “took the brakes off” the immune system and the other “hit the gas”. Cancers often have proteins on them that hide them from an immune system response. The immunotherapy agent can block these proteins and suddenly make the cancer visible to your immune system. Then another agent kind of revs up the immune system to really hit it hard. Side effects are often autoimmune effects, since the supercharged immune system can also attack parts of your body which aren’t diseased. These side effects can often be managed. In my wife’s case, they were fairly mild and really only resulted in destroying her thyroid, which is common with them and is easily treated. A small price to pay to survive. I’m sure we’ll see more and more uses for immunotherapy treatments in the future.
I suspect he’s had at least one kind of it and had to stop. He has only spoken about his treatment in generalities. He said his first treatment did nothing. His second worked but cause intolerable side effects. I forget just what the’d said about the side effects but at the time I thought they sounded like autoimmune side effects. They are the main problem with immunotherapy. It can get your immune system to fight the cancer but sometimes it fights significantly more than just the cancer. There are now a growing list of types of immunotherapy and a different one might work better or be tolerated better. And that may work better combined with other kinds of therapies. The initial breakthroughs in immunotherapy came in melanoma. Different immunotherapy tactics had long been tried in that because clinically the immune system spontaneously cures that more often than other cancers. It took 40+ years trying before doctors got any positive results, but the first couple in melanoma showed the way to more.
Stupid headline writers. Almost everyone survives the diagnosis. It’s the cancer that kills.
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