Immunotherapy: What is all the buzz about?
*Blair Grass serves as our volunteer Cancer Guide. She's available to help patients and survivors sort through some of the confusing parts of cancer treatments and recovery.
In this month's newsletter, she explains the basics of Immunotherapy and provides tips for talking with your care team about this treatment option.
Immunotherapy is quite the buzz word in the cancer treatment world. Often it is included under the umbrella term of chemotherapy, but it is not the same thing. Chemotherapy is the term given for cytotoxic therapies that target rapidly dividing cells. They target specific phases of the cell growth cycle however they do not differentiate between cancerous and healthy cells. As other rapidly dividing cells die side effects such as low blood counts, hair loss and gastrointestinal issues may occur.
So what is immunotherapy? Immunotherapy treatments are designed to use our own immune system to fight cancer. Immunotherapy is available in intravenous form, oral therapy, topical applications and for intravesical (in the bladder) use. Some types of immunotherapy help your body identify specific cancer cells (checkpoint inhibitors, adoptive cell transfer, monoclonal antibodies and treatment vaccines) and other types give your immune system a boost to work better against cancer (cytokines and BCG).
Immunotherapy is considered a major breakthrough in cancer treatment because of the specific and targeted ways it allows the body to fight cancer. Immunotherapy is not available for every type of cancer but there are increasing applications to many disease types including melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, head and neck cancers and lymphoma. In breast cancer Herceptin and Perjeta are now widely used targeted immunotherapies, specifically these are both monoclonal antibodies. Other immunotherapy drugs that are being used include (trade names):
Checkpoint inhibitors: Opdivo, Yervoy, Keytruda, Tecentriq
Monoclonal antibodies: Rituxan, Campath, Kadcyla, Avastin, Erbitux
Cancer treatment vaccines: Provenge
Questions you can ask your treatment team about Immunotherapy:
What type of immunotherapy (if any) would you recommend for me, and why?
What are the goals of this treatment
Will my immunotherapy be combined with any other types of treatment?
How will I receive my immunotherapy? How often?
What are the possible side effects? How will this impact my daily life activities?
What immunotherapy clinical trials are available for me?
Thanks for reading this general overview of immunotherapy. If you have general questions about immunotherapy I’m happy to help answer them or provide support in how to discuss immunotherapy with your treatment team.
Warm regards,
Blair Grass
Young Adult Cancer Guide
Resources:
For overviews of treatment options (this includes more than just immunotherapy) by disease type this is a great resource https://www.cancer.gov/publications/pdq/information-summaries/adult-treatment
ASCO Understanding Immunotherapy: https://www.cancer.net/sites/cancer.net/files/asco_answers_immunotherapy.pdf
Recent Advances in Immunotherapy: https://www.cancer.net/blog/2018-01/car-t-cell-immunotherapy-2018-advance-year
