How Is Immunotherapy Used to Fight Cancer?

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Doctor Kenneth Fink, I am a medical oncologist at Zimmer Cancerous Center in Wilmington, North Carolina. Immunotherapy of cancer has become a very recent and and wonderful innovation in the treatment of cancer. Most of us in oncology especially medical oncologists like myself are very excited about this. Immunotherapy is very different than chemotherapy. The traditional treatment that we think about for for cancer is chemotherapy where we give certain drugs usually poisons or toxins that will will poison the cancerous cell. Usual the usual way chemotherapy does that is by going into the cancer cell and destroying the DNA which is what cancer cells need to reproduce to to make copies of themselves. Immunotherapy uses a whole different whole different line of of a tack if you will against against cancer cells. There are various kinds of immunotherapy, the most recent ones we have come up with are antibodies against cancer. We have antibodies that will attack the surface of of a cancerous cell where there are particular receptors. Receptors are certain proteins that may be found on the on the outer membrane of the cancerous cell. Immunotherapy use, what are called monoclonal antibodies, these are very specialized drugs that are still considered drugs but they have been developed to attack the surface of the cancer and what happens is it will actually turn the cancer cell growth off. Which is one mechanism by which it by which it works. Another mechanism is that sometimes by binding to the cancerous cell the immune system will come in and and and destroy the cancerous cell because it is coated by by an antibody. Another way immunotherapy is working is we are taking drugs actually in pill form that a person can take and the drug is what we call a small molecule, meaning it can pass in through the though the digestive system into blood stream and actually pass into the inside part of the cancer cell and and turn off the what we call signals. Signaling is something that occurs from the outer membrane of the cancer cell into the nucleus. And we actually have drugs and and and there are a bunch of chemicals that go across from the membrane into the nucleus and tell the cancer cell to to grow. We have drugs now that can actually stop that signaling they will block those steps. And that is a a very very great innovation we have it is very convenient for patients to take these drugs, they do not have a lot of the typical side effects of chemotherapy like nausea or vomiting or hair loss. We have noticed people get some skin rashes and and and some times their blood pressure may go a little bit higher, but the side effects in general are much better. We are incorporating immunotherapy quite a bit now in in upfront therapy of of cancers. Both before the cancer is spread and even after it has spread and we have we have been getting much better results and much better survival rates do to this innovation. So even though therapy is is one of the one of the greatest innovations we have had in cancer therapy."