Immunotherapy for Mesothelioma
Treating mesothelioma patients with immunotherapy relies on helping the body's immune system to recognize the difference between healthy cells and cells that have become cancerous.
To understand how immunotherapy works, it is first important to understand how the immune system recognizes the difference between body cells and foreign cells. The immune system does this by recognizing and reacting to antigens. Antigens are molecules that are present on the surface of all cells, whether human, bacterial, or viral. A normal immune system can react to and destroy cells that produce antigens that are foreign, but cannot react to cells that produce "self" antigen (an antigen produced by the body).
Immunotherapy, therefore, is geared towards making the immune system recognize antigens on cancer cells as being foreign, allowing the immune system to destroy those cells.
Active Immunotherapy Treatment for Mesothelioma
Active immunotherapy treatments are designed to stimulate the immune system to fight disease. Vaccines, for example, are a type of active immunotherapy. Cancer vaccines are slightly different in that they are designed to fight diseases that already exist in the body, whereas most other vaccines are administered to prevent disease.
Mesothelioma vaccines may be created by removing cancer cells from a mesothelioma patient. This is usually done in a laboratory by using either whole cancer cells or antigens removed from cells. The cells or antigens are modified in a laboratory so they can be recognized by the patient's immune system and are then injected back into the patient.
Active immunotherapy treatments for mesothelioma are highly specific treatments made with cells from the patient's own body. Thus, a different vaccine is created for each patient who receives active immunotherapy treatment.
Passive Immunotherapy Treatment for Mesothelioma
Passive immunotherapy treatments are those which use components that are created outside the body. These types of treatments differ from active immunotherapy in that passive treatments do not attempt to force the immune system to actively destroy cancer cells.
One example of a passive immunotherapy treatment is monoclonal antibody therapy, which is currently the most widely used immunotherapy for treating cancer. Antibodies are molecules the immune system produces to help fight infections. In an immune system that is functioning normally, antibodies are produced that recognize and bind to foreign antigens present on foreign cells, which effectively targets foreign cells for destruction by other parts of the immune system.
Monoclonal antibody therapy involves removing cancer cells from a patient, which are then grown together in a laboratory with other cells that produce antibodies in response to antigens on the cancer cells. During this process, identical antibodies are produced that recognize the same antigen (hence the termed monoclonal).
The next stage of the treatment involves injecting the patient with the monoclonal antibodies. Once inside the body, the antibodies recognize and bind to tumor cells, as the tumor cells possess the specific kind of antigen that the antibodies were created to identify. If the cancer treatment is successful, the immune system will recognize the monoclonal antibodies and destroy the cancer cells.
As with active immunotherapy, passive immunotherapy treatments are typically specific to an individual patient because cancer cells from the patient's own body are used.
To read more the full article, click Mesothelioma Immunotherapy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment