Effective Therapy For Breast Cancer
Immunotherapy for breast cancer involves using medicines to trigger a person's self immune system to identify and demolish the cancer cells. Immunotherapy drugs strengthen your immune system and ease its ability to detect cancer and eliminate it.
Need for immunotherapy
Task assigned to the immune system is to protect your body against various diseases, whether it is acute or chronic. For example, cancer cells were once your naturally healthy cells working normally, but certain changes in their genetic information lead them to behave abnormally. Therefore, the immune system fails to identify them as foreign bodies.
Cancer cells may release some substances that could prevent the immune system from identifying them. In addition, even if the immune system identifies cancer cells, the response might not be strong enough to destroy them.
How is immunotherapy used to treat breast cancer?
A protein named PD-1 present on T cells is targeted by a PD-1 inhibitor named pembrolizumab. By obstructing this protein, the immune system is boosted, and then it acts against the cancer cells.
Pros of immunotherapy
When other therapies fail, and you start losing hope, then immunotherapy for breast cancer is the option as it uses your own immunity to fight against the disease.
Even though you are having chemotherapy, it isn't showing the results as it should. Then having immunotherapy can make chemotherapy work with better results.
This therapy focuses more on boosting your own immunity and then fighting against the disease, so it has lesser side effects.
The best plus point of this therapy is that, after having this, your immune system will memorize it for the rest of your life. This is immune memory.
For example, when in the future you have contact with such disease again, then your immune system will on its own produce immunity against it.
CONCLUSION
Immunotherapy is a brand new technique and is still evolving. With this technique, the focus is on treating the specific tumour site. Therefore, as the immune system can remember the treatment, this method is always a point ahead of other therapies.
Immunotherapy just discovers a way to manipulate the immune system to work harder than it usually does. As a result, you can visit cancer alternative treatment centers and get some help from them.
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