What you can expect during biological therapy for cancer depends on the type of treatment you receive. Biological therapy for cancer helps the body's immune system kill cancer cells.
In general, biological therapies work by:
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Getting the immune system to attack cancer cells. There are several ways biological therapy treatments can do this. One way is putting chemicals that get the immune system working into the body. Another is training a sample of immune system cells from a person in a lab to attack cancer cells, then putting them back into that person's body.
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Making cancer cells easier for the immune system to find. Biological therapy also can target the cancer cells, turning on or off cell signals that help cancer cells hide from the immune system. For example, medicines called immune checkpoint inhibitors can target certain receptors on the surface of the cancer cells. The inhibitors block the signals the cancer cells send to keep the immune system from finding them.
Many different biological therapy treatments exist, including:
- Adoptive T-cell therapy.
- Bacillus Calmette-Guerin therapy, also called BCG therapy.
- Cancer vaccines.
- Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy.
- Cytokine therapy.
- Immune checkpoint inhibitors and modulators.
- Immunoconjugates.
- Immunotherapy.
- Monoclonal antibodies.
- Targeted therapy.
- Tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy.
Some types of biological therapy are used only in clinical trials. That means they still are being studied. Biological therapy for cancer is an active area of cancer research.