By: David Westrom
Cancer immunotherapy is a treatment for cancer involving the body’s own immune system as the actual treatment (Dillman 2011). Instead of medications, like chemotherapy, or external treatments, like radiation, cancer immunotherapy makes use of the patient’s built in disease-fighting system to kill cancer cells. As a result of the immune system’s complexity, however, there are numerous types of immunotherapy treatments with different mechanisms of action. From 1986-2010, the FDA approved 17 different cancer immunotherapy treatments, ranging from BCG, an injected bacterium, to cytokines, proteins normally secreted by cells that activate an immune response, to adoptive cellular therapy (ACT), the use of cells to treat cancer (Dillman 2011). Each of these treatments has shown at least some success in treating certain types of cancer. Out of the immunotherapy treatments available, adoptive cellular therapy shows extra promise in its ability to cure multiple types of cancer and could eventually become a mainstream solution to curing cancer patients.