Immunotherapy, A new era of hope

New breakthroughs in immunotherapy treatments are a game changer, transforming the way cancers are treated points out Dr. Mohanad Diab, Consultant of Medical Oncology

Dr. Mohanad Diab
Consultant of Medical Oncology

Over the last few years, the advances made by immunotherapy in attacking cancers previously thought unstoppable have been especially promising. In fact, the results indicate that this form of treatment is revolutionary and could eventually lead us to find a cure for cancer.

For many advanced cancers, we were previously unable to do anything for many of the patients and we were simply forced to send them home. But immunotherapy has opened the door to better cancer care and has even helped stop the progress of cancers in quite many patients.

How it works?

Immunotherapy uses a class of medicines that stimulate the patient’s immune response and teach white blood cells to search and destroy and act against cancer cells. Unlike traditional chemotherapy, these medicines do not kill healthy cells. More and more resources are currently being invested into researching immunotherapy.

Dr. Diab elaborated, “I personally have many patients on immunotherapy and here, I would like to mention an example where a patient with advanced nasopharynx cancer, one of the hardest cancers to treat (in the past). This patient received several lines of chemotherapies, to which her disease was responsive for a while and then became unresponsive. She was then shifted to immunotherapy. In the past, I would have said there was nothing more to be done for her; but now thanks to immunotherapy this patient is in remission, until now, the size of her tumor is shrinking, and her disease is under control, which means it is clearly improving.”

As in her case, many new immunotherapy drugs have helped these cancer patients a lot and this represents a scientific and medical breakthrough.”

Dr. Diab pointed out that prior to immunotherapy, the only option for treatment was chemotherapy where patients were often complaining about a lot of its side effects. Chemotherapy helped improve the outcome of these patients and now immunotherapy has added more power to existing momentum.

Combination Therapy and New Advances

In fact, many studies released recently have shown that a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy is especially effective in some cases with generally expected safety profiles, said Dr Diab.

There are also other advances in the field. Initially, immunotherapy could only be used against cancer cells if the protein receptors on their surface responded to the immunotherapy medication PDL1, thus enhancing the body’s immune response. This was determined through molecular genetic testing before the treatment was administered.

Recently, however, researchers have found other medicines that do not even need a positive response from protein receptors. It means immunotherapy can potentially be used to treat even more and more cancer patients in future,” concluded Dr Diab.