Mesothelioma immunotherapy is a new treatment technique that helps the patients’ own immune system to fight the cancer. Immunotherapy was developed after doctors realized that the immune systems are very powerful weapons in fighting all sorts of diseases, including asbestos cancer.
Mesothelioma immunotherapy helps the body’s natural defense mechanism by providing it with proteins, like cytokines, interferons, a substance that is naturally found in the body and when the body lacks it, it is harder to fight cancer.
How mesothelioma immunotherapy works
To understand how mesothelioma immunotherapy works, we have to know how the immune system works:
- The body’s natural defense system is able to tell healthy cells apart from foreign or damaged cells
- After that, by the use of some specific antigens, the immune system decides if the cells contain cancer or not
- When it has detected cancer, specific chemicals are released into the organism to fight it
Those chemicals aren’t enough, unfortunately, to completely wipe out the cancer, so the answer for that could be immunotherapy. The body is provided with all chemicals it needs in order to properly treat itself. The immune system cannot recognize mesothelioma cancer cells because they produce the same antigens as healthy cells. Mesothelioma immunotherapy helps in that way by using some drugs that force cancer cells to produce a specific type of antigens, so that the immune system recognizes them as cancer cells. Also, immunotherapy detects certain phenotypes. Doctors will find some with clinical trials before starting mesothelioma immunotherapy, they need to know which chemicals is the immune system lacking.
Types of mesothelioma immunotherapy
There are two main types of mesothelioma immunotherapy:
- Passive immunotherapy – the immune system is not actively forced to destroy cancer cells. This type of immunotherapy uses elements that are created outside the body.
- Active immunotherapy – forces the immune system to fight the disease and destroy cancer cells. Similar to vaccines that are administered to prevent diseases from starting, only the vaccines for mesothelioma are administered to stop the disease from spreading and helping the immune system produce antibodies to fight it.
Immunostaining is a branch of immunotherapy and it helps diagnose mesothelioma tumors in the lungs. An immunostain is created by extracting tissue and test it against certain chemicals, which is very helpful when starting immunotherapy. The doctor will also need an immunohistochemistry, to be able to distinguish malignant mesothelioma from pulmonary adenocarcinoma.
Mesothelioma immunotherapy is a risk free procedure and doctors recommend it to almost all patients that can undergo a small surgery. It is also covered by insurance.
Get mesothelioma immunotherapy treatment
Contact asbestosis and mesothelioma centers if you need any kind of information regarding immunotherapy, and we will be happy to provide it for you, absolutely free.