In the article “Fighting Cancer” by Barbara Mantel for CQ Researcher, she goes over not only the pros but also some of the possible cons of immunotherapy. Before I used to think that immunotherapy took long enough to get here but now that it’s here it would be the answer to all our cancer-related problems.
However, by reading this article, I learned from Mantel that immunotherapy also has its downsides, such as letting go of the brakes of the immune system, not always eradicating the cancer fully, and having to wait until the cancer has mutated before immunotherapy can kick in.
Immunotherapy consists of the immune system being stripped of its boundaries and freed to do and act as it deems appropriate. T-cells, a type of white blood cell, are amped up until they can not only detect a common cold, but also a major disease like cancer. In Mantel’s words, the normal is for “our immune system [to be] highly regulated because we want it to see foreign invaders, but we don’t want it to attack our own tissues.” By setting it free, we risk the chance of having our immune system go out of control and start attacking other tissues and organs in our body that it is not supposed to attack. This could possibly lead to autoimmune diseases, which occur when the body sees its own tissues as foreign and starts actively attacking and weakening them.
The next point that caught my attention was how immunotherapy is not successful every time it is used in a new patient. In the article, Mantel explains that “while immunotherapy can yield dramatic results, only about 20 to 30 percent of patients respond.” This, according to her, is a great mystery to scientists and a big part of the research surrounding immunotherapy seeks to figure out and understand the reason why this happens. This data goes to show how immunotherapy can’t be blindly depended on to save a life. At least until a stronger version with higher, more dependable success rates comes out, both patients as well as doctors will have the constant concern of checking to make sure that immunotherapy is actually having the desired effect on the body.
The last negative aspect of immunotherapy Barbara Mantel’s piece taught me about is how even if modified T-cells are injected into the body, the tumor still needs to have gone through certain mutation for the immune system to recognize it as a threat and start defending the body against it. Mantel states that through her own research she found that “patients who respond to the checkpoint blockers have cancers with more mutations.” This means when the cancer is in its earliest stage, or hasn’t yet started mutating and developing, the immune system might not perceive the presence of cancerous cells. This loss in time can be crucial in scenarios where action has to be taken as soon as possible to prevent the cancer from metastasizing and spreading to other organs.
I consider the information in Mantel’s article to be useful and important to know because people like me who read about this new science and become enraptured by the knowledge that we might finally have the cure for cancer in our hands need to know both the positive and negative effects that immunotherapy brings to the body. After all, we wouldn’t want to inject something into our body that will do more harm than good.
Immunotherapy 