How does immunotherapy work by helping your body’s natural defence systems find and eliminate cancer cells. It’s often recommended as a frontline treatment for certain cancer types or in combination with other treatments like chemotherapy.

Your immune system has powerful fighters called T cells that hunt and kill cancer cells. But sometimes they’re too strong and damage healthy cells as well. To prevent this, your body has proteins that act as “on/off” switches to tell the T cells to stop attacking a cell. These proteins are called checkpoint proteins. Cancer drugs can disrupt the function of these checkpoint proteins to allow the T cells to continue to attack cancer cells.

Applications of Custom Monoclonal Antibodies in Biomedical Research

One type of immunotherapy uses antibodies that block these checkpoint proteins and help your T cells keep fighting cancer. This type of therapy is called anti-PD-1/PD-L1 antibody therapy and it’s the most widely used immunotherapy for cancer. Other immune therapies are targeted to specific cancer genes or proteins. One example is talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC), which targets the protein CD47 on cancer cells and encourages your T cells to recognise and destroy the tumours.

Another form of immunotherapy involves taking T cells from your body and genetically modifying them in the laboratory to make them more powerful cancer fighters. Your doctor then puts these supercharged T cells back into your body. This type of therapy is called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T) therapy and it’s used to treat leukaemia and some lymphomas. It’s also being tested to see if it can treat other cancers like non-small cell lung cancer and melanoma.