Nowadays one cannot go online or read a magazine without encountering an article with a title along the lines of “This or That, Has Now Been Found to Cause Cancer!” Almost daily there are headlines announcing that scientists have researched activities, products, or food we have been consuming our whole lives, and have discovered that we have actually been putting carcinogen agents into our bodies without even knowing it. As we go about our daily lives, we frequently see or hear about people within our community that are battling cancer. More times than we realize, these people and their families are depending on a sudden medical discovering to save their life because the already existing ways to treat cancer are not enough for the aggressiveness of the disease.
Coming from a family where several of my relatives have had to fight against cancer and it ended up costing their lives, throughout my life I have often found myself interested in keeping track of what scientists are doing to help other patients not go through the same ordeal and come out victorious at the end of their journey against cancer.
This is why for my semester-long project I chose to research and report about immunotherapy, which is a new type of cancer treatment that has been in the works for quite a few years now but only recently started being used experimentally yet successfully on some cancer patients.
So why is immunotherapy a revolutionary discovery?
Basically the way immunotherapy works is, instead of injecting chemicals that do almost as much good as they do harm to the body as it is done in chemotherapy, the patient’s T-cells are extracted from the blood and turned into cancer-fighting cells. These new T-cells are then injected back into patient and expected to kill the cancer cells, ideally ridding the patient of the disease. In other words, it is as if the immune system was put on vitamins to make it stronger and be able to fight cancer on its own, without the help of any other chemicals. Can you imagine how relieved cancer patients would be to able to focus only on their recovery rather than worrying about all the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation?
Since each patient’s case and cells are different, the T-cells used to make the body fight off cancer cells have to be specifically tailored for each individual. This is not a medicine that can be mass-produced and distributed, hence why only a handful of people have gotten to try it out so far.
Hundreds of doctors from the most prominent medical institutions in the United States like Stanford Medicine, UCLA, UCSF, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center are currently working on not only advancing the development of this treatment, but also on getting funding and finding ways to be able to bring immunotherapy to the discussion table for all the millions of cancer patients out there waiting for a new alternative they haven’t tried yet.
However, although immunotherapy has been successful in curing a good number of the patients it’s been tested on, it is not fully developed to provide certainty just yet. As someone who lost their mother to cancer and experienced firsthand all the consequences and side effects of cancer to one’s physical, emotional, and mental health I can’t help but have so many questions and wonder how this treatment will benefit current and future cancer patients, and also the ways it might burden them. How much will an immunotherapy cycle cost after it is fully developed and in the market? Will families be able to afford it, or will money be an issue that will stand in the way of good health? Will it be available worldwide or only in the most advanced countries? Will it have harmful side effects? Will immunotherapy be enough to fight even the most advanced types of cancer? As the semester progresses, I hope to broaden my own knowledge as well as my peers’ and other readers of my blog, and to find the answer to all these questions.
Immunotherapy 