What Are the Strategies to Enhance Immune Function?
Immunotherapy Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment designed to boost the body's natural defenses to fight cancer. It includes various approaches like checkpoint inhibitors, CAR-T cell therapy, and cancer vaccines. These therapies help to enhance the immune response or restore the immune system's ability to identify and attack cancer cells.
Checkpoint Inhibitors Checkpoint inhibitors are drugs that block proteins used by cancer cells to suppress the immune system. By inhibiting these checkpoints, such as PD-1 and CTLA-4, the immune cells can better recognize and destroy cancer cells.
CAR-T Cell Therapy CAR-T cell therapy involves modifying a patient's T cells to express a receptor specific to cancer cells. These engineered T cells are then reinfused into the patient, where they can target and kill cancer cells more effectively.
Cancer Vaccines Cancer vaccines aim to stimulate the immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign and mount a sustained immune response against them. These vaccines can be preventive or therapeutic and are designed to target specific cancer antigens.
Adoptive Cell Transfer Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) involves isolating immune cells from a patient, expanding them in the lab, and infusing them back into the patient to enhance the immune response against cancer. This approach includes therapies like tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and engineered T cells.
