Newswise — New Brunswick, N.J., June 13, 2024 – Immunotherapy, a type of cancer treatment that uses a person’s own immune system to attack cancer cells, is continuing to transform cancer treatment and care.
Christian S. Hinrichs, MD , chief of the Section of Cancer Immunotherapy and co-director of the Duncan and Nancy MacMillan Cancer Immunology and Metabolism Center of Excellence at Rutgers Cancer Institute and RWJBarnabas Health, shares the basics of immunotherapy, who can benefit from it and what the future holds for this groundbreaking treatment. How it works: In a healthy body, the immune system fights off infection and other diseases because it is able to differentiate healthy cells from harmful substances and abnormal cells.
However, cancer cells are often invisible to the immune system, which means that the body cannot detect the disease in order to fight it. Immunotherapy works by helping the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells. There are several types of immunotherapies.
They are different , but their aim is the same: to improve the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. CAR T-Cell therapy involves taking T cells from the patient’s blood and genetically modifying them in a laboratory to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) on their surface. These CARs enable the T cells to specifically recognize and attack cancer cells.
The modified T cells are then infused back into the patient, where they multiply and target the cancer cells. Monoclona.
