As a designer of fantasy-style board games, Kate Beckett knows that timing and chance can play important roles in a player’s survival. Living with metastatic endometrial cancer, she has proof both can also be helpful in the real world. Beckett had already endured a hysterectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and a serious kidney infection during six years … Read more
Immunotherapy for cancer is a form of treatment that uses the body’s immune system to combat the disease. Today, immunotherapy is being applied to a wide range of cancers, often in combination with other agents, and clinical trials are exploring ways of improving and expanding its effectiveness. A particularly promising form of immunotherapy, known as … Read more
Immunotherapy for cancer has made some of its biggest inroads against hematologic malignancies such as leukemia and lymphoma, with treatments such as checkpoint inhibitors and CAR T-cell therapies producing long-lasting remissions in some patients. But there’s broad agreement that the potential of such therapies has only begun to be tapped and that combining immunotherapy drugs … Read more
For all their potential to curb or even cure some cancers, drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors come with a caveat: They’re effective in only a subset of patients. Predicting who those patients are, and understanding why others don’t respond as well, remains a major challenge. In a new study, researchers at Dana-Farber in collaboration … Read more
Barry Nelson describes his family’s cancer history as “prolific.” Nelson’s grandmother, mother, and two aunts all died from cancer, and it seemed like Nelson might be next. “One morning, I woke up and I had a pain in my neck on my left side. I went to my primary care physician and, ultimately, I found out … Read more
Medically reviewed by Natalie Collins, MD, PhD New treatments that spur the immune system against cancer have entered the clinic to combat some forms of pediatric blood cancers, such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). One form of immunotherapy, CAR T cells, has been approved for children and young adults with ALL. In treating solid tumors … Read more
Immunotherapy refers to treatments that use the body’s immune system to combat diseases. Immuno-oncology focuses on efforts to use the immune system as a weapon against cancer. The immune system is a collection of organs, tissues, specialized cells, and substances that protect the body against infection and disease. While the immune system can often handle very small … Read more
Gene therapy and immunotherapy are both types of treatment for cancer and other diseases, and they have some points at which they intersect. But ultimately they represent different approaches to disease therapy. Most diseases aren’t caused by a single mutant gene — an alteration in the DNA sequence — but some mainly rare, inherited disorders, … Read more
What are PD-1 and PD-L1? PD-L1 is a protein on the surface of some cancer cells that interacts with the PD-1 protein on T cells of the immune system to thwart an immune attack on the cancer. It’s one of the tools that cancer cells use to escape an attack by the immune system and … Read more
Jen Mancuso’s analytical mind has served her well during her career as a biochemist and information technology expert. Thinking like a diagnostician has also allowed her to remain upbeat while facing the greatest challenge of her life: stage IV melanoma. A wife and mother of two pre-teen daughters, Mancusco, 41, says she appreciates the intricacies … Read more
Immunotherapy drugs can be more effective against cancer when combined with other therapies, such as radiation therapy, targeted drugs, or other immunotherapy agents. Clinical trials that are currently underway are testing such combinations in a variety of cancers. It might seem that immunotherapy and chemotherapy make an unpromising pair. Chemotherapy, after all, is known to … Read more
Marking the first time an immunotherapy agent has been approved for the treatment of a form of breast cancer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the use of the drug atezolizumab in combination with the chemotherapy drug nab-paclitaxel for patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer. The approval was granted on an accelerated basis … Read more
Six years’ worth of repeated surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy with three different agents failed to halt the growth of Frances Zichichi’s brain tumor. As it kept recurring and more surgeries were required, Zichichi lost the use of her left side. Eventually the cancer formed masses under her scalp, causing pain, which was dulled only with … Read more
Experts from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and elsewhere have contributed to turning discoveries about the immune system into immunotherapies for cancer. Over the past decade, immunotherapy has fundamentally changed the way cancer is treated in many patients. Still Swimming with Sharks After Inflammatory Breast Cancer As a veteran scuba diver who has donned her wetsuit around … Read more
A growing number of researchers are testing the potential role of natural killer cells—”NK cells”—in cancer immunotherapy.
Scientists at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center (DF/BWCC) have identified biomarkers in melanoma that could help tailor immunotherapy treatments to maximize the benefits for patients while reducing the likelihood of severe side effects.
As scientists have learned more about the intricate workings of the immune system, they’ve developed new forms of immunotherapy that have been approved for the treatment of leukemia or are being clinically tested in patients.
Nancy Hale was given a 30 percent chance of surviving three years when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. But today, six years after her initial diagnosis and because of an immunotherapy clinical trial, Hale is in remission—and “blazing the trail” for other patients.
“It has been the holy grail of oncology to develop potentially curative treatments for advanced common solid tumors, and it may now be on our doorstep for at least some patients,” says Bruce Johnson, MD, a thoracic oncologist and chief clinical research officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Robert Johnson remains in remission more than three years after participating in a pioneering immunotherapy clinical trial for his stage IV adenocarcinoma non-small cell lung cancer.