It used to be science fiction. Harnessing your body’s own immune system to fight cancer. But what was once the fruit of a wild imagination is today a reality.
Rather than killing cancer cells directly with traditional approaches like radiation or chemotherapy, immunotherapy harnesses the immune system’s power to eliminate the cancer or slow its growth and ability to spread.
Research shows immunotherapy is improving outcomes and survival rates for some patients, including kidney and lung cancer. In fact, research from the American Association for Cancer Research shows that for advanced-melanoma patients, survival rates are improving thanks in part to these new treatment options.
Biopharmaceutical researchers are urgently working to gain new insights into the complex interactions between patients’ immune systems and the cancer cells growing in their bodies with the goal of markedly improving outcomes in more tumor types.
With 836 medicines and vaccines in development for cancer, 80 percent of which have the potential to be first-in-class treatments, millions of Americans living with cancer have hope for a brighter future.
Welcome to the new era of medicine.
