Cancer kills millions of people every year, making it one of humanity's greatest health challenges. Several older family members of mine have recently passed away from various forms of cancer, prompting me to think more about the illness as well as what treatments are being utilized as potential cures. In my preliminary research, I learned about one relatively new technique, immunotherapy, that is currently being used to treat forms of lung cancer and lymphatic cancer. Immunotherapy or biological therapy is the treatment of disease by activating or suppressing the immune system. I discovered that in their establishment of this cancer therapy, 2018 Nobel Laureates, James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo, have constituted a major breakthrough in our world’s fight against cancer and I was curious to learn more.

Throughout this project, I researched the topic of immunotherapy. Without much prior knowledge, I began by learning to understand the basic mechanisms used by this medical technology -- how immunotherapy uses one’s own immune system to fight cancer. I continued my research reading three articles. The first article, titled Development of New Immunotherapy Treatments in Different Cancer Types, gave me a general understanding of how the use of different therapeutic treatments can lead to a manipulation of the immune system. And how these manipulations can stimulate immune agents such as cytokines, vaccines, cell therapies, and humoral, transfection agents in order to target cancer cells. The second article titled, A Guide to Cancer Immunotherapy: From T cell Basic Science to Clinical Practice, focused more specifically on T cells and T cell therapy and its role in immune responses to cancer. As T cells are a crucial component of immunotherapy, learning how to harness T cells to fight cancer proved to be very important. According to the method called adoptive T cell transfer, T cells are removed from the patient, genetically modified, or treated with chemicals that enhance their activity, and re-introduced into the patient. There are several trials using adoptive T cell transfer techniques that are currently enrolling patients with cancer. Finally, in order to understand the effectiveness and success of immunotherapy in living organisms, I read a third article, titled Combination Immunotherapy of Primary Prostate Cancer in a Transgenic Mouse Model Using CTLA-4 Blockade. This article demonstrates that an effective immune response against primary prostate tumors in transgenic mice can be elicited using a strategy that combines CTLA-4 blockade and an irradiated tumor cell vaccine. Importantly, this article found that treatment of transgenic mice using immunotherapy at 14 weeks of age resulted in a significant reduction in tumor incidence (15% versus control, 75%), as assessed 2 months after treatment. This article also required me to learn about T cell inhibitor proteins, CTLA-4 and PD-1, which I explain in the immune defense graphic on the website. Ultimately, after reading these three articles, I formed a greater understanding of how immunotherapy works to target cancer cells and its effectiveness in living organisms.

Modern medicine has allowed scientists to develop new technologies to treat types of cancer that were previously thought to be incurable. For over a century, scientists have attempted to understand how to engage the immune system in the fight against cancer. The discovery and establishment of immunotherapy has now revolutionized cancer treatment and has fundamentally changed the way we view approaches to cancer management. Immunotherapy provides a new class of drugs for cancer therapy. Today, scientists understand that tumors mediate immunosuppression through cellular mechanisms, which protects tumors from immune system recognition and elimination. In time, immunotherapy combined with other forms of target therapy will lead to advances in personalized medicine, greatly increasing the overall survival rate for patients with cancer and helping doctors to achieve success in fighting one of humanity’s most dreaded diseases.