Fabruary 2021.
It’s difficult to deny that over the past few years, the major progress in the treatment of cancer patients has been due to advances in new understandings and developments in the field of immunotherapy. Today, we can certainly confirm that immunotherapy treatment for cancer has joined other well-known pillars of cancer therapy such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
Immunotherapy is a form of treatment that jump-starts a person’s own immune system to fight a disease. For many years it has been known that the immune system plays an important role in cancer development and using immunotherapy to fight cancer has been a long-time goal for researchers and scientists.
Throughout history, there have been multiple attempts to understand and harness the immune system to fight malignant cells. Early scientific experiments took place at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries when the pathological confirmation of malignant cells was made possible. Early experiments, more than 100 years ago, established the effectiveness of a certain heat-inactivated bacteria (Coley’s Toxins*) that when injected into patients with advanced malignancies, resulted in the reporting of a “major” success for an otherwise untreatable case. It was just 50 years ago that this approach was validated using Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) as an effective treatment for superficial bladder cancer.
It took many more years and discoveries of the immune system cells and molecular behavior, but towards the last 20 years of the 20th century, the first biological modifiers (cytokines and interferons) and, subsequently, immune checkpoint blockers were discovered and developed, allowing immunotherapy to enter the 21st century as the next successful chapter in the treatment of cancer.
