Cancer drug checkpoint inhibitors – Cancer drug treatment, chemotherapy, began in the 1940’s. It has since boomed into a multi-billion-dollar industry with over a hundred cancer drugs divided into many subcategories that can target the cancer at the DNA level, at different points in the cellular growth cycle, or can even encourage the body’s own immune system to recognize the cancer for the threat it is and attack appropriately.
How checkpoint inhibitors work
Most people are familiar with the idea of vaccines and how they trigger an immune response within the body so that the body recognizes a particular type of invader. The tetanus vaccine, for example, is administered and the body mounts a defense against it, then if tetanus enters the body at a later time the body is ready with its heightened response and is able to quickly recognize and fight of the tetanus bacterium.
Checkpoint inhibitors don’t work quit the same way but they do depend on the immune system in a way that other cancer drugs do not. The immune system is the body’s way of fighting off disease. In order to do this, the cells in the immune system need to be able to recognize the difference between the body’s own cells and invaders such as viruses and bacteria that need to be attacked and dispelled from the body. In order to make this identification, the body has checkpoints on some of its immune cells. When these checkpoints are turned off, the immune response which is a complex chain reaction of events does not even begin. Some cancers are able to push this off switch and thus escape the body’s defenses. What if there was a way to turn that switch back on so the body’s immune response would be in full force against invading cancer? It seems that the new check point inhibitor drugs may be able to do just that.
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