Question: Will immunotherapy be a turning point in the fight against cancer? i really would like to know ! this topic is very interesting to me !!!

Annabel Black answered on 21 Jun 2023:

As an immunologist I absolutely think yes! How our immune system interacts with cancer is also fascinating to me – it’s what I’m doing my research on now. The failure of our immune system to catch and kill developing cancer cells one of the first reasons we develop cancer at all. Targeting this with immunotherapies means we can re-teach our immune cells to recognise the cancer cells, kill them and also tell more immune cells exactly what to look out for – it’s super interesting! There’s already been lots and lots of success with immunotherapies for cancer patients already (one of which is called checkpoint blockade – we can give patients drugs that make our killing immune cells called ‘T cells’ go into a sort of super killing mode to attack the tumour cells). This doesn’t quite work in all cancers where there are fewer immune cells in the tumours or the immune cells don’t response to the therapies – we’re still trying to understand why this is and how we can change that.