Immunotherapy: An Overview

Shir Sakhi^*
*Correspondence: Shir Sakhi, Department of infectious Disease, Osmania University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Email:

Editorial

The treatment of disease by activating or suppressing the immune system is known as immunotherapy or biological therapy. Immunotherapies that elicit or magnify an immunological response are called activation immunotherapies, while those that diminish or suppress the immune response are called suppression immunotherapies. Immunotherapy has piqued the interest of researchers, doctors, and pharmaceutical corporations in recent years due to its potential to treat a variety of cancers. As a result, the standard of cancer care is evolving, as is the complexity of patient care management. Some malignancies respond well to cell-based immunotherapies. Lymphocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells, natural killer cells (NK Cell), cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL), and other immune effector cells work together to fight the body against cancer by targeting aberrant antigens produced on the surface of tumour cells. Immunity to COVID-19 is mostly based on an immunomodulatory T cell response.

In the treatment of cancer patients, the field of immuno-oncology has proven revolutionary. In the late 1800s, William B. Coley, now widely regarded as the father of immunotherapy, attempted to harness the immune system's capacity to cure cancer for the first time. As an orthopaedic surgeon who operated on patients with bone sarcomas, he found that certain patients who had major postoperative wound infections—a common occurrence when aseptic technique wasn't yet perfected—would have their unresected tumours spontaneously shrink.

Chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation were once the mainstays of cancer treatment, with the goal of killing or eliminating cancer cells and tumours. These treatments can be quite beneficial, and they are still utilised in many circumstances. James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018 "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." Cancer immunotherapy attempts to stimulate the immune system to destroy tumours. A number of strategies are currently in use or are being researched and tested. Cell-based immunotherapy has been shown to improve survival and disease-free time in randomised controlled studies in various cancers, and its efficacy is increased by 20–30 percent when combined with conventional treatment methods.

The BCG vaccination, which was originally developed to prevent tuberculosis but later discovered to be useful in the treatment of bladder cancer, is one of the earliest kinds of cancer immunotherapy. Both local and systemic immune responses are induced by BCG treatment. The methods by which BCG immunotherapy induces tumour immunity have been extensively researched, yet they remain a mystery [1-6].

Conflict of Interest

None

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