Other Approaches To Cancer Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy for cancer has been described as the next "moonshot" for cancer research, and since President Obama announced the awarding of $1 billion in government research funding, the various pharmaceutical companies that stand to make a profit have presented a united front to promote the possibilities of adoptive cell therapy. However, there are other techniques of cancer immunotherapy that have been around longer that also sometimes get good results.

Enzyme Therapy for Cancer

Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a New York City doctor who later had to relocate his practice to Mexico and who died in 2015 , believed that the immune system might be able to fight cancer on its own if it simply got some help with disposing all the waste products released when cancerous tumors died. To facilitate the breakdown of cancer cells so they could be removed from the body, he gave patients large doses of pancreatic enzymes, up to 180 enzyme capsules a day. In four cases of pancreatic cancer, patients of Dr. Gonzalez lived much longer than expected. In a clinical trial of a variety of types of cancer, his patients lived  only 1/3 as long as conventionally treated patients.

Fighting Cancer with Viruses

The improbably named Talimogene Laherparepvec is an oncolytic, or "cancer dissolving" virus developed by BioVex, Inc. for treating melanoma. It has been approved for use in both the United States and the European Union. This virus was genetically engineered from the herpes virus HSV-1, the kind of herpes that most commonly causes cold sores. The genetic engineers removed the virus's ability to cause the symptoms of herpes, made it more compatible with cancerous skin cells than healthy skin cells, and added genes that enabled it to secrete a substance called a cytokine, which initiates an immune response.

What this virus does is to give the immune system a target. White blood cells can't "find" melanoma, but they can find the virus, and it attacking the melanoma tumors that have been infected with the virus, they kill both the virus and the cancer. Shanghai Sunway Biotech, in China, has engineered a "colds" virus that has been modified to attack head and neck cancers. This treatment is available in China.

Vaccines Against Cancer

Personalized vaccines against cancer have been successful in a limited number of cases. These vaccines are not mass produced. Instead, they are made for a unique combination of markers from the patient's own cancer. Every cancerous tumor produces at least 100 different proteins that could be used by the immune system to locate and identify it, but the immune system tends to "forget" which markers are associated with the tumor. A vaccine "reminds" the immune system that it needs to attack the cancer by concentrating just a few of the markers to "teach" the immune to fight the cancer. At this time, vaccines are an addition to other treatments for cancer. They don't replace traditional treatments for cancer.

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And that may be the case with all kinds of immunotherapy for some years to come. Very few doctors believe that immunotherapy will provide a magic bullet for killing cancer any time soon. Immunotherapy combined with other treatments, however, may help many more people achieve remission and resume their lives.