Cancers Immunotherapy Can Treat

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JEAN KOFF
There are so many different immune therapies available right now. Some are drugs. Some are cells. And the most successful arena, at least for the cell-directed therapy, tends to be the blood cancers, such as lymphoma, leukemia, to some extent multiple myeloma. But immunotherapy as a whole has actually been very successful in targeting solid tumors as well.

So cancers that are especially easily targeted include lung cancers, skin cancers, and some types of colon cancer. We've been successful in finding targets on the cancers that right now have approved therapies of immunotherapies that work very well. And so sometimes that means finding a protein that's specific to the cancer that's on the cell surface, and so the immunotherapy is able to target that specific protein.

Other times it's figuring out how the immune system is being evaded by the cancer. And once we figure that out for a certain cancer type, then we can engineer our approaches. The hope is that all cancers might be targetable by some sort of immunotherapy, but we need to do more studies to find out how best we can get those cancers to respond.