Modified from © iSTOCK.COM; tHE scientist STAFF
Cancer therapy turned a corner when physicians started enlisting patients’ own immune systems to kill tumor cells. Since 2011, the FDA has approved six drugs targeting proteins that act as off switches for the immune system. Deactivating them allows the immune system to roar to life and fight cancer cells.
These therapies can sometimes treat melanomas, cancers of the lung, kidneys, bladder, head and neck, as well as Hodgkin’s lymphoma. And when they work, they are near-miraculous. Yet for most patients, the drugs don’t have an effect, or cancer eventually returns. Cancer, it turns out, can develop resistance to this ramped-up immune attack. Scientists are just beginning to grasp the multitude of strategies cancer can use to thwart immunotherapies.
“With immunotherapy, you’re really impacting the immune system rather than the disease itself,” says Sacha Gnjatic, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine ...
