Frequently Asked Questions on Cancer Immunotherapy for the Complete Beginner.

If you’re beginning to study or learn about cancer immunotherapy, you might have a lot of basic questions that need answering, related to the reason why it was developed in the first place despite the presence of several mainstream treatments, and its basis, and why it is useful in the treatment of cancer. And thus in this brief Q&A guide we’ll cover all the questions related to this form of treatment to reach clarity.

So what are mainstream treatments of cancer?

Mainly, they are surgery, chemotherapy (evolved from using mustard gas), and radiation therapy.

And how do the work basically?

Surgery cuts off cells from the body, chemotherapy poisons the cells to their death, and radiation therapy burns them.

And what is wrong with these treatments?

When you’re looking for a way to end a disease, you want to work only on the disease, not on the healthy cells, and these treatments could be extremely lethal and even lead to death in many cases or disfigurement with a lot of unfavorable side effects.

Could any of these treatments be used alone to treat cancer?

Not really, usually the oncologists do the best they can by combining the treatments together to produce the best curative effect possible with the least side-effects using these the combination of all these mechanisms together.

And how did immunotherapy evolve from these techniques?

Scientists were trying to look for a magic bullet, a one stop solution for all cancer without the damage of chemotherapy, they wanted a way to target only cancer cells and kill them and at the same time prevent the healthy cells from being damaged at all, and it’s well-known that the immune system does that naturally.

And is that type of treatment is the ultimate solution for cancer?

Unfortunately, it’s not a first-line type of therapy yet, and it has many limitations, but it certainly has a strong enhancing effect when used in combination with other types of treatments.

If we’re using the immune system, why is it in the first place it can’t attack cancer on its own?

For several reasons , first of all the cancer cells weren’t cancerous in the first place , they were healthy body cells , now that they’ve turned cancerous , the body still identifies them as a part of the body and thus these cells produce the same proteins that put the immune system in check .

Another reason is that even if they do detect some of the cells, the responses aren’t strong enough to completely annihilate them.  

And thus this wraps our brief Q&A about cancer immunotherapy and how it evolved from mainstream treatments and why it’s important for the body.

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