“Immunotherapy is very exciting because the immune system is a natural and highly effective tool to fight disease,” Hoos explained. “No other drug or course of treatment has been able to generate the long-term benefits and promise for patients seen with cancer immunotherapies.”
The beautiful thing about the immune system, according to Dr. Roy S. Herbst, professor of medicine at Yale Cancer Center and chief of medical oncology at Smilow Cancer Hospital Center at Yale-New Haven, is its durability. Unlike chemotherapy, the immune system is highly specific and adaptive, able to distinguish between self-markers (the body’s own tissues) and foreign invaders that might make us sick. Herbst, a leader in lung cancer treatment and research, draws an analogy to childhood vaccinations. Vaccines trigger our immune system to respond on its own, as though we have been infected with the disease. Similarly, antibody immunotherapies block specific proteins that cancer cells use to hide from the immune system, allowing the body to recognize a tumor as a foreign invader.
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