What is immunotherapy and what role does it play in cancer treatment?
An ESUN Article Dr. Mary Louise Keohan Immunotherapy, which is also called biological therapy or biotherapy, is a treatment that uses certain characteristics of the body’s immune system to fight disease. As we will see later, the basic idea of cancer immunotherapy is to try to get the immune system to react to the tumor’s cancer cells as if they are foreign. The use of immunotherapy as a cancer treatment is not new. Dr. Herberman (Ref. 1) notes that, “For over 100 years, immunologists have been intrigued by the concept that tumor cells are foreign to the local host and that the immune response has the potential to recognize the key difference(s) and reject the tumor cells.” Drs. Brown and Kirkwood (Ref. 2) point out that immunology has, “burgeoned from the esoteric specialty of a small body of individuals into an immense academic discipline whose basic doctrines permeate all aspects of clinical medicine.” Although immunotherapy is sometimes used by itself, it is typically used as an ad
