Hacking the Body’s Defenses
Cancer patients are seeing real wins from immunotherapy. Dozens of treatments are now approved. Over 30 cancer types get the help. It works because tumours are sneaky. They switch off your immune cells like a light switch in an empty house. Antibody drugs, known as checkpoint inhibitors, flip that switch back on. They wake the cells up. The body recognizes the enemy again and attacks.
It works especially well on “hot” cancers. Think melanoma. High mutation counts mean the immune system has more targets. But it is not a magic bullet for everyone. Why some thrive and others shrug off the treatment? That is a mystery. Researchers are trying to crack it. A four-year study launched last week will track thousands of patients with breast, bladder kidney, and skin cancers. They want to know what drives outcomes.
Other antibodies play a different game. Herceptin targets breast and stomach tumours. It flags them for destruction. It also blocks the chemical signals that tell cancer to grow. Vaccines are promising too. Many use the same mRNA tech as the Covid shots. Over 100 of them are in trials. They train the immune system to hunt tumours.
Some therapies use the patient’s own cells. In 2018 a woman with metastatic breast Cancer had a radical treatment. Doctors harvested immune cells from her tumour. They grew billions in a lab. They put the most aggressive ones back in her blood. Car-T-cell therapy does similar things but engineers the cells first. Sam Neill, the Jurassic Park guy, used it. He had stage 3 blood cancer. Now he is cancer-free.
“We increasingly see cancer as something shaped by the immune system… In fact, the appearance of cancer is the immune system failing to eliminate it.” – Samra Turajlic
That quote changes how we see the disease. Samra Turajlić runs the CR Manchester Institute and heads the cancer lab at Francis Crick. She says we don’t fight cancer anymore. We recruit it.
Calming the Storm
Cancer immunotherapies fire up the immune system. Other conditions need the opposite. They need dampening.
The simplest fix? Allergy shots. Expose people to tiny amounts of peanut protein. Build up tolerance slowly. One trial in China tried pancakes to cure egg allergies. Creative? Yes.
Bristol researchers tried something weird recently. They gave tocilizumab to people with depression. It is usually for rheumatoid arthritis. The study was small. Too small to be definitive. But the hints were there. Less fatigue. Lower anxiety. Better mood. It makes you wonder what else lies hidden in the body’s wiring.
Then there are the Tregs. Regulatory T-cells. Last year’s Nobel winners identified their power. While most immune cells attack, Tregs tell the others to stop. They stand down the army when the war is over.
David Liston from Aila Biotech is using Tregs for multiple sclerosis. The disease happens when the immune system attacks the nervous system. Liston wants to boost Tregs in the Brain. He wants them to call off the attack. The same trick might reduce swelling after head trauma.
The pipeline is full. Treg therapies aim for dementia, lupus, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn’s disease. Peter Eggenhuizen at Monash is testing them for inflammatory bowel disease. That hits 7 million people worldwide.
Liston says it’s huge. “Probably half of all deaths involve immunology.” Ageing, infections, allergies, diabetes. It is the underlying theme. And here is the best part.
The immune system is malleable. You can change it. You can adapt it.
