This year the Nobel Prize in Physiology/ Medicine was awarded to James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for their work on unleashing the body’s immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options. Their work has been dedicated to developing Immune checkpoint inhibitors: These drugs basically take the ‘brakes’ off the immune system, which helps it recognize and attack cancer cells.
It has been found that the best results of this therapy are for patients with a healthy microbiome. Patients that have healthy microbiome respond and have the best chances for survival with this new cancer therapy.
What the immune system does?
Your immune system is a collection of organs, special cells, and substances that help protect you from infections and some other diseases. Immune cells and the substances they make travel through your body to protect it from germs that cause infections. They also help protect you from cancer in some ways.
The immune system keeps track of all of the substances normally found in the body. Any new substance that the immune system doesn’t recognize raises an alarm, causing the immune system to attack it. For example, germs contain substances such as certain proteins that are not normally found in the human body. The immune system sees these as “foreign” and attacks them. The immune response can destroy anything containing the foreign substance, such as germs or cancer cells.
The immune system has a tougher time targeting cancer cells, though. This is because cancer starts when cells become altered and start to grow out of control. The immune system doesn’t always recognize cancer cells as foreign.
Clearly, there are limits on the immune system’s ability to fight cancer on its own, because many people with healthy immune systems still develop cancer. Sometimes the immune system doesn’t see the cancer cells as foreign because the cells aren’t different enough from normal cells. Sometimes the immune system recognizes the cancer cells, but the response might not be strong enough to destroy the cancer. Cancer cells themselves can also give off substances that keep the immune system in check.
To overcome this, researchers have found ways to help the immune system recognize cancer cells and strengthen its response so that it will destroy them.
What Is cancer Immunotherapy using checkpoints inhibitors?
Immunotherapy is a treatment that uses certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. In the last few decades immunotherapy has become an important part of treating some types of cancer.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors to treat cancer are new developments in cancer treatment.
An important part of the immune system is its ability to tell between normal cells in the body and those it sees as “foreign.” This lets the immune system attack the foreign cells while leaving the normal cells alone. To do this, it uses “checkpoints” – molecules on certain immune cells that need to be activated (or inactivated) to start an immune response.
Cancer cells sometimes find ways to use these checkpoints to avoid being attacked by the immune system. But drugs that target these checkpoints hold a lot of promise as cancer treatments.
Drugs that target PD-1 or PD-L
PD-1 is a checkpoint protein on immune cells called T cells. It normally acts as a type of “off switch” that helps keep the T cells from attacking other cells in the body. It does this when it attaches to PD-L1, a protein on some normal (and cancer) cells. When PD-1 binds to PD-L1, it basically tells the T cell to leave the other cell alone. Some cancer cells have large amounts of PD-L1, which helps them evade immune attack.
These drugs have also been shown to be helpful in treating different types of cancer, including bladder cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, and Merkel cell skin cancer (Merkel cell carcinoma). They are also being studied for use against other types of cancer.
One concern with all of these drugs is that they can allow the immune system to attack some normal organs in the body, which can lead to serious side effects in some people. Common side effects of these drugs can include fatigue, cough, nausea, loss of appetite, skin rash, and itching. Less often they can cause more serious problems in the lungs, intestines, liver, kidneys, hormone-making glands, or other organs.
What is the most effective way for immunotherapy song checkpoint inhibitors?
It has been found that Gut Bacteria Influence the Effectiveness of Immune checkpoint inhibitors to treat cancer.
Checkpoint inhibition can cause even advanced tumors to shrink rapidly or disappear. Unfortunately, only a minority of patients have such strong responses to these therapies, and researchers have been trying to figure out why.
The three new studies, published January 5 in Science, all identified groups of intestinal bugs that they classified as “good” and “bad” in terms of their influence on the response to checkpoint inhibitors. People who had lots of the good bacteria were more likely to respond to these drugs. People who had little of the good bacteria—or lots of the bad bacteria—were less likely to see their tumors shrink or stop growing in response to the drugs.
Using mouse models of cancer, the researchers also found that altering the overall composition of gut bacteria, known as the gut microbiome, could affect whether tumors responded to checkpoint inhibition.
The different categories of bacteria appeared to have different effects on the immune system. Good bugs, for example, seem to prime immune cells to recognize tumor cells, whereas bad bugs seem to interfere with immune cell function.
All three studies identified different species of “good” and “bad” bacteria, and the authors suggested that human clinical trials combining treatments to alter gut bacteria with checkpoint inhibitors should be carried out.
Conclusion:
Finding the new class of immunotherapy drugs can help patients to live longer and treat certain cancers, For patients that do have healthier microbiome before the start of using those checkpoints immunotherapy drugs they have better outcomes.
Those research findings bring attention to the importance of healthy microbiome, which is to have good bacteria in our gut, skin, and mouth.
How to have a healthier microbiome, you can learn more here:
At Nebraska Family Dentistry we are dedicated to the latest research and how it may apply to dentistry. Overall Health and Dental Health are closely related and we often see even healthiest patients developing cancers.
We are on the mission to help patients to Live Longe r& Better by bringing you any information that can improve overall and dental health.
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