Cancer Immunotherapy: Will it be a cure...? By Katherine Lightwood

Cancer Immunotherapy: Will it be a cure...?

By Katherine Lightwood

Cancer: It is very likely that you know somebody that has been diagnosed with cancer or even that you've lost somebody your loved one or your relatives to this terrible disease. As a former biochemistry student, I've always wanted to do something on this field, some initiative to find any sort of cure for such a deadly disease. After I've lost my grandma because of this disease's ugly fate I lost all hope.

So, far in the field of cancer treatment, there were only three options:

• Surgery
• Radiotherapy 
• Chemotherapy

And of course, they are of great value. In some cases, they can effectively remove cancer cells and sometimes even cure cancer patients. But they have one major disadvantage in common and that is they can not discriminate between cancer cells and healthy cells. and as a consequence, healthy cells are damaged and somehow removed during the treatment. To avoid too much damage to these healthy cells the cancer treatment need to be applied very carefully bringing in the risk that there are some cancer cells that are left behind that can form a new trait that has a chance to grow out and form a new tumor after treatment.

Therefore the key challenge to finding a cancer treatment is to find a way to specifically kill every single cancer cells avoiding the healthy cells. And might be the key to these treatment lies in the immune systems of these patients. Because immune cells can specifically interact with cancer cells only. Have you ever thought why the body's immune cells couldn't kill the cancer cells as it does with the other infectious cells?

Immune system's in-house defense mechanisms that protect your body for various types of dangerous threats. For instance, if you get the flu you will feel sick initially but after a week or so you feel better again and it's simply because your immune system has destroyed the virus.

But in cancer, cells can evolve several mechanisms to make make the immune attack ineffective. And as researchers developed (still developing) a new way of cancer treatment called Cancer Immunotherapy.

This therapy aims to make the immune attack effective again using the patients own immune system. Well, there are several ways to approach it and the focus so far has been boosting the already existing immune attack. And interestingly, this method has seen quite a decrease in the cancer growth. Cancer Immunotherapy has been regarded as a new breakthrough in cancer treatment. But unfortunately, it was not always successful and still many patients are not cured. So, therefore it's is becoming an essential requirement to develop immunotherapy further. Well, I am off this field but just keeping my fingers crossed what people do to develop this.

So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page. And Do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.

Katherine Lightwood