What to know about cancer immunotherapies

There are many different types of treatment for cancer. These include surgery, radiation (high-dose X-rays), and chemotherapy (drugs that kill cancer cells or decrease their growth). Another treatment option is immunotherapy. This is the term used for drugs that use your own immune system to fight cancer. Immunotherapy can be used by itself or along with other treatments. The treatment options a cancer care team recommends will depend on several factors, including the kind of cancer, the stage, and a person’s overall health.

Types of immunotherapies

There are several different categories of immunotherapies, but these therapies generally work in one of two ways. Some work by boosting the immune system so it attacks cancer cells more effectively. Others work by providing the body with extra substances to help the immune system fight cancer.

Here’s a closer look at different types of immunotherapies:

Adoptive cell therapy

This treatment involves removing your own immune cells from your body and either changing those cells or increasing the number of those cells in the lab. These changed cells are then placed back into your body where they are better able to recognize and attack more cancer cells.

This approach can be used to treat certain types of leukemia (cancer of the blood), lymphoma (a blood cancer that affects the immune system), and melanoma (a type of skin cancer that is uncommon but causes most deaths from skin cancer).

One example of an adoptive cell therapy is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. T cells are immune cells that help the body fight infection. In this type of treatment, a doctor removes T cells from a patient’s blood. The cells are specially treated in a lab and then reinserted into the patient’s body where they can better find and attack cancer cells.

Cancer vaccines

These vaccines are used as therapies to target cancer cells in certain types of cancer. For example, cancer vaccines are often used to treat cancer of the bladder or prostate (a male reproductive organ that sits below the bladder and makes semen). Cancer vaccines may also be used to help prevent the human papillomavirus (HPV) from causing cancer, such as cervical cancer.

Checkpoint inhibitors

These drugs block parts of the immune system, which can stimulate immune cells to attack cancer cells. They are currently used to treat more than a dozen types of cancer, including cancers of the cervix (which connects the uterus to the vagina), head and neck cancer, liver cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer, and lung cancer.

Monoclonal antibodies

These versions of immune system proteins are made in a lab and are designed to attack a specific part of a cancer cell. They are used to treat many forms of cancer, including cancer of the breast, brain, and lung, as well as colorectal cancer (a digestive cancer that affects the large intestine and the rectum, the last several inches of the large intestine).

Oncolytic virus therapy

This form of treatment uses viruses that have been changed in a lab so that they can infect and destroy cancer cells. So far, only one of these types of therapies is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat cancer. It’s used for metastatic melanoma (a type of skin cancer that has spread to other areas of the body).

Meanwhile, clinical trials are being conducted to combine an oncolytic virus with a checkpoint inhibitor for people with colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, and appendiceal cancer (cancer of the appendix).

Non-specific immunotherapies

These are treatments that use different approaches to help the immune system destroy cancer cells.

Cytokines

Cytokines are proteins in the immune system that carry messages between cells. In doing so, they help activate the immune response. Drugs using lab-made cytokines stimulate immune cells to attack cancer. They can be used for certain types of cancers of the kidney, blood, and skin, and for tumors that form on bones and soft tissues like muscles.

Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG)

This therapy uses a bacterium that is similar to the one used to create the tuberculosis vaccine. When BCG is placed in the bladder, it stimulates the immune system to attack bladder cancer cells.

Deciding to use immunotherapy

Cancer is a different experience for everyone, and the best approach to treating cancer depends on many different factors. Immunotherapies offer promising treatment for many people, but they are not right for every type of cancer or every person who has cancer.

If you or a loved one is living with cancer, talk to your healthcare team about your treatment options. They can help you determine if immunotherapy should be included in your treatment plan. If you have further questions about immunotherapy and whether your insurance covers this type of treatment, speak with your healthcare provider. You can also ask about financial help to cover costs and about participating in a clinical trial of immunotherapy.