Immunotherapy is really breaking through now
The coronavirus has had a major impact on regular healthcare. Fortunately, medical progress has not stood still and there are many new developments. What new treatments are medical specialists looking forward to in 2021?
John Haanen is a medical researcher at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in Amsterdam. In close contact with other researchers, he translates lab results into concrete treatments for patients.
According to Haanen, immunotherapy has really made a breakthrough in recent years. “It has even become the standard treatment for more and more cancers. In immunotherapy we use the human immune system to tackle the tumor. These are specific immune cells, the so-called T cells. Normally, they will usually not take action against cancer cells on their own, because cancer cells are also the body’s own cells. They can do that with a little help.”
One such aid is the checkpoint inhibitors. “These medicines, as it were, remove ‘the brake’; T cells are now no longer stopped from attacking tumor cells. It works very well in Hodgkin, lung, skin and kidney cancer, among others, unfortunately especially in the short term. Only one in five patients has long-term benefit from this.”
Another tool is dendritic cell therapy. “The effect of this can be compared to how a vaccine works. T cells are extra motivated to emit certain substances with which they can make the tumor harmless.”
‘Most tumors disappear like snow in the sun’
Recently, Haanen’s colleague Myriam Chalabi made an important breakthrough in colorectal cancer. “We know that cancer is caused by mistakes in the DNA,” Haanen explains. “The more mistakes in that DNA, the more dangerous the tumor usually becomes. But with immunotherapy, those mistakes actually work to your advantage. Because of these mistakes, tumor cells are more easily recognized and cleared by the T cells. In colon cancer cells we often see a lot of mistakes. These respond particularly well to immunotherapy. In less than six weeks we saw most tumors disappear like snow in the sun.”
But even if not all tumor cells disappear after immunotherapy, the treatment has benefits, according to Haanen. “Immunotherapy prior to surgery also has very positive effects. As a result, a smaller operation is required. Finally, an additional advantage is that the chance of metastases is also a lot smaller.”
This article previously appeared in Plus Magazine January 2021. Want to subscribe to the magazine? You can do that in an instant!
Sources):
- Plus Magazine
