Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is treatment designed to harness the ability of a patient’s immune system to combat disease or infection. This treatment may produce an immune response to the disease or it may enhance the resistance of the immune system to active diseases like cancer. Immunotherapy is also referred as biological therapy sometimes, and often uses substances related to BRM.

A human body usually produces only small amounts of these BRMS in response to the disease or infection. However, in the laboratory, large amounts of BRMs can be generated to provide a cancer therapy, rheumatoid arthritis as well as other illnesses.

There are treatments to reduce the immune cells. Post these treatments, the T cells, grown in the lab will be given back to the patients via a needle in their vein. This process of growing the T cells in the lab may take 2 - 8 weeks, completely depending on how fast they grow

Examples: Monoclonal antibodies, interleukin-2 (IL-2), interferon, and colony-stimulating factors CSF, G-CSF, and GM-CSF. Currently, Interferon is being used to treat hepatitis C and along with IL-2 as a treatment for the advanced malignant melanoma.

Various types of immunotherapy are used to treat cancer including:

Monoclonal antibodies, drugs that are designed to bind the specific targets in the body that causes an immune response to destroy cancer cells.