How Immunotherapy Works to Kill Cancer Cells

Immunotherapy is a kind of cancer treatment that uses your body's own immune system to find and kill cancer cells. Your immune system is great at fighting infections from outside invaders, like bacteria and viruses. But cancer cells trick your immune cells into ignoring them so they can multiply and spread. Immunotherapy drugs work in different ways to keep immune cells from being tricked so they can kill cancer cells.

In adoptive T cell immunotherapy, doctors remove some of your immune cells, find the best ones for fighting cancer, and multiply those cells billions of times over in a lab. They then give them back to you, now with the capability to attack cancer cells. In some cases, doctors may also genetically modify the cells to better find and attack specific cancer cells. Immunotherapeutic cancer treatments present a new and promising way to fight cancer.