Immunotherapy Advances Again: Lifespan Increased for Leukemia, Ovarian Cancers

The realm of immunotherapy has to do with the stimulation of the body's own immune system, or giving it a "boosting power", to treat a disease.  This departs from the conventional direct attack with a medication.  There are also other types of immunotherapy that are known as immunosuppression, such as drugs given to assist the body in not rejecting a transplanted organ that its immune system may recognize as a foreign invader, rather than an essential item.  Here, however, we will focus on activation immunotherapy, and its recent advancement against specific cancers.

The beginnings of immunotherapy actually arose in the 19th century when Dr. William Coley raised a culture of aggressive bacteria and injected it into the tumors of cancer patients.  Though he had success in his trial, he and other physicians were not able to duplicate the results.  Thus, immunotherapy, while never having gone away completely, was mostly shunned in favor of chemotherapy drugs and radiation.  A probable reason for the subsequent failures, it has been thought, is due to the fact that cancer is heterogeneous in nature, and even the same type can react very differently from patient to patient.  Thus, there need to be many more species of bacteria and viruses utilized for strengths and limitations in various cancers.

A three stage cyclic approach to immunotherapy with dendritic cells.

Author Simon Caulton, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dendritic_cell_therapy.png

 

 Immunotherapy became slightly resurgent in the latter half of the 20th century with Interleukin.  Now, after the turn of the 21st century, more and more research centers are delving in to this previously fringe treatment that has the potential to surpass chemotherapy.

Recent trials with an immunotherapy called CAR T-cell therapy yielded a considerable breakthrough.  CAR stands for Chimeric Antigen Receptor, which are engineered to graft coding onto T-cells.  An obstacle to the body's ability to kill cancer is that cancer cells share a lot of the same DNA and traits as normal cells, so the immune system in its raw state has a hard time telling the difference and knowing which cells to attack and which to leave alone.  The CAR's boost the ability of the T-cells to distinguish between a cancer cell and a normal cell.  Trials, which began to report results in the latter half of 2014, was conducted on patients with acute lymphoblastic (ALL) leukemia.  Out of 100 patients, 70 have gone into complete remission 

 

A similar encouraging report was given by Texas Oncology, P.A. in a Phase II trial in process for ovarian cancer.  The patients that received the immunotherapy treatment have yet to have a recurrence of their cancer as of the end of March, 2015.  The patients that received the standard treatment had a recurrence at a median of 14.5 months.

In the months and years to come, the Sphere of Health will keep you updated on the progression of this old, but new realm of cancer treatment.  The moderating of oncolytic viruses, especially, has branched out in recent years, as we turn our enemy into an ally.  Bacteria and viruses that are usually thought of as hostile are going to be used to kill a body's greatest self manufactured enemy - cancer.