Marcela Moreno Wilches
Latin News Agency for Medicine and Public Health
Kidney cancer is among the ten cancers with the highest incidence in the population, affecting an equivalent of 1.7 in men for every woman.
Immunotherapy is a treatment that provides drugs that activate a person’s immune system in order to attack cancer cells.
If your treating doctor has recommended immunotherapy as part of your cancer treatment, here we tell you what your alternatives are and what we expect from it.
As a first step, it is important to clarify that when the immune system detects a new substance in the body, it generates an alarm and activates different attack mechanisms against it to identify it as a foreign agent. This immune response is capable of destroying everything from germs like viruses and bacteria to cancer cells.
Despite their destructive capacity, eliminating cancer cells is not so easy, as cancer occurs when healthy cells change or are altered and begin to grow out of control, so the immune system may not always recognize them. with strangers.
In the case of kidney cancer, various types of immunotherapy can be used, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, effective drugs to attack PD-1, a protein present in the T cells of the immune system that, being blocked by the drug, it activates the immune response against cancer cells, leading to a decrease in tumor size and growth. These inhibitors have been shown to increase patient survival and are highly effective in cases of recurrence.
Another type of immunotherapy used is cytokines, very small proteins that regulate the activity of immune cells, sending signals that activate to fight cancer.
Cancer vaccines are another option, which, in this case, is injected to treat some types of cancer already diagnosed or as a method of prevention.
Other alternatives for kidney cancer patients are artificially manufactured immune system proteins commonly known as monoclonal antibodies (mABs or Moabs), which are found to be highly effective in treating a specific area of the cancer cell by weakening the disease. .
The infection programmed by oncolytic viruses, is another of the treatments used to remove tumor cells and is used successfully in patients with kidney cancer.
Do not forget that its treatment is unique and depends on multiple factors such as the type of cancer, the stage of the disease, individual characteristics, among others. Your attending physician will be the one to determine the plan to follow to maintain a proper state of health. Follow your recommendations and rigorous sea with your checks and medications.