Immunotherapy for Gynecological Cancers: What’s New?
In gynecologic cancers, immunotherapy is being used in all stages of treatment, and researchers are trying to enhance the effects of different immunotherapy approaches.
Immunotherapy
How is Gene Therapy Being Used to Treat Cancer and Other Diseases?
Gene therapy is a way of treating or preventing disease by altering the genetic instructions within an individual’s cells.
Checkpoint Inhibitors: How Researchers are Expanding this Form of Immunotherapy
Researchers are confident that the potential of checkpoint inhibitors has only begun to be tapped.
How Scientists are Looking to Expand the Benefits of Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy can be dramatically successful for people with limited options — so scientists are working on expanding the benefits to other patients.
What is Monoclonal Antibody Therapy for Cancer?
Monoclonal antibody therapy is a kind of immunotherapy that empowers the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells.
New Clinical Trials Test Immunotherapy for Cervical Cancer
Researchers are applying the knowledge they’ve gained in previous clinical trials as they look into how immunotherapy might provide additional treatment options for patients with recurrent cervical cancer.
What is a Living Drug?
“Living” drugs consist of fully functional cells that have been selected and often modified to treat specific diseases, such as cancer. CAR T-cell therapy and therapeutic vaccines fall into this category.
CDK4/6 Inhibitors: How Do They Stop Breast Cancer Growth?
So far, CDK4/6 inhibitors have been shown to be most effective in treating advanced estrogen-receptor positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.
What is the Future of Immunotherapy?
Immunotherapy is a kind of treatment that has had stunning results in some patients with cancers like melanoma, lymphoma, and kidney cancer. Immunotherapy drugs empower the body’s immune system by enabling the body to fight cancer — an approach that can slow or halt cancer in certain patients. In our latest podcast series, The Science … Read more
Precision Medicine and Immunotherapy for Cancer: What to Know
Precision medicine and immunotherapy are changing the landscape of cancer treatment. The aim of precision medicine, sometimes called personalized medicine, is to match treatments to individual patients taking into account their genetic makeup, medical history, test results, and other distinctive characteristics. Unlike precision medicine, immunotherapy is a particular form of treatment, aimed at manipulating the patient’s … Read more
Immunopatient: One Patient’s Story of Cancer and Immunotherapy
It’s not uncommon for cancer patients to take to a pen after a diagnosis. Peter Rooney’s taken that to another level. Rooney, a former journalist and author of the book Die Free, captured his cancer journey in the new book Immunopatient: The New Frontier of Curing Cancer. The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Immunopatient by … Read more
Stomach Cancer: How Immunotherapy and Targeted Therapy are Changing Treatment
The approval of a targeted therapy and an immunotherapy drug for some patients with advanced stomach cancer reflects recent new approaches to this difficult-to-treat cancer that hasn’t had many therapeutic advances in recent years. Stomach cancer, uncommon in the United States but a leading cause of cancer death globally, causes few definitive symptoms in early … Read more
Can Immunotherapy Help Patients with Small Cell Lung Cancer?
Small cell lung cancer is the most aggressive type of lung cancer. Unlike its far more common counterpart, non-small cell lung cancer, treatment with immunotherapy drugs hasn’t yet been approved for small cell lung cancer, but some early findings in clinical trials suggest this type of treatment may have potential. Small cell lung cancer gets … Read more
Inoperable Cancer: What Does it Mean?
A cancer can be inoperable for a variety of reasons. “Liquid cancers,” such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, are considered inoperable by nature, because they involve cells or tissues that are dispersed throughout the body. Leukemia and multiple myeloma, for example, originate in abnormal cells of the bone marrow, the spongy material within the … Read more
CRISPR Enables Cancer Immunotherapy Drug Discovery
This originally appeared on Vector, Boston Children’s Hospital’s blog. A novel screening method using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology has revealed new drug targets that could potentially enhance the effectiveness of PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors, a promising new class of cancer immunotherapy. The method, developed by a team at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, uses … Read more
Treating Cancer by Location or Genetic Markers: Which is Better?
In the past, treating cancers involved classifying them primarily by the organ or tissue where they arose – like the skin, the lungs, the breast, or the colon. Today, it’s often possible to identify the genes and proteins responsible for a tumor’s growth, and, in some cases, to offer a drug treatment that specifically targets … Read more
Cancer Treatment: A Look at How It Has Evolved in 70 Years
In 1947, when Dana-Farber Cancer Institute founder Sidney Farber, MD, set out to find a drug treatment for childhood leukemia, cancer treatment took two forms – surgery to cut out cancerous masses, and radiation therapy to burn them out. Cancers that couldn’t be removed or irradiated – either because of their position in the body, because … Read more
Immunotherapy for Breast Cancer: What’s the Latest?
Immunotherapy refers to treatments that use the body’s own immune system to combat diseases. While immunotherapy hasn’t yet had as big an impact on the treatment of breast cancer as it has on some other cancers, scientists agree on its potential to improve outcomes for many patients with breast malignancies. Who can be treated with … Read more
What’s New in Immunotherapy for Brain Tumors?
Vaccines, drugs, and modified human cells that activate the immune system against cancer have improved outcomes and prolonged lives in some types of cancer in the past few years. For patients with glioblastoma, the most common primary brain tumor in adults, immunotherapy has shown some promise in clinical trials — but it can’t yet be … Read more
Immunotherapy for Prostate Cancer: What’s the Latest?
Efforts are under way to develop and test new immunotherapy approaches for prostate cancer.