In short
Immunotherapy works by helping the immune system detect and attack cancer cells, with checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T among the approved approaches.
On this page
01
How the Immune System Normally Misses Cancer
The immune system is generally good at recognizing and destroying abnormal cells, but cancer cells can develop ways to hide from it or actively switch off the immune response nearby, allowing them to grow largely unchecked despite an otherwise functioning immune system.
Immunotherapy is a category of cancer treatment built around reversing this hiding or switching-off process, rather than attacking the tumor directly the way chemotherapy or radiation does, which is why it works through very different mechanisms and has a different set of side effects.
02
Checkpoint Inhibitors Explained
Immune cells carry built-in brakes, called checkpoints, that normally prevent the immune system from attacking the body's own healthy tissue. Some cancer cells exploit these same brakes to avoid being attacked, effectively telling nearby immune cells to stand down.
Checkpoint inhibitor drugs block these brake signals, allowing immune cells to recognize and attack cancer cells more effectively. Several checkpoint inhibitors are now approved for use in a number of cancer types, generally as part of a broader treatment plan decided with an oncology team.
03
CAR-T and Engineered Immune Cells
CAR-T therapy takes a different approach: a person's own immune cells, called T cells, are collected, genetically modified in a lab to better recognize a specific target on cancer cells, then multiplied and returned to the body to seek out and attack those cells.
This approach has been approved for certain blood cancers and represents a distinct strategy from checkpoint inhibitors, since it directly re-engineers immune cells rather than simply releasing an existing brake on them.
04
Where It Works Well and Where It Doesn't Yet
Immunotherapy has produced durable responses for some people with certain cancer types, sometimes even after other treatments had stopped working, but it does not work equally well across all cancer types, and researchers are still studying why some tumors respond strongly while others show little response.
Side effects also differ from traditional treatments, since an activated immune system can sometimes attack healthy tissue as well as cancer, which is why immunotherapy requires careful monitoring by a treatment team throughout its use.
Sources
- Immunotherapy to Treat Cancercancer.gov
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