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Harnessing The Immune System To Fight Cancer

Checkpoint inhibitors are drugs that pull off cancer's invisibility cloak by blocking the switch that turns it on.

"It prevents that invisibility cloak or that force field or shield ... from going up," Brahmer says, "so it can't shield itself from the immune system."

And these drugs seem to be working, at least for some patients — melting away the toughest tumors, such as some melanomas, the deadliest kind of skin cancer.

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This drug is one of a class of drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors. These are immunotherapy medicines that work not by directly attacking the cancer itself, but actually getting a person's immune system to essentially do the work. These are drugs that have been around in melanoma and other cancers for quite a while, but really have not been part of the routine care of colorectal cancers until fairly recently.

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Despite indications of success with melanomas, many scientists thought the checkpoint-inhibitor mechanism would not be broadly effective.

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One way that cancer has been able to evade the immune system is through overexpression of immune checkpoint proteins (immune inhibitory pathway), which allow cancer cells to be considered “self” instead of foreign and block T-cell action.

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Resources

National Cancer Institute

Immune checkpoints engage when proteins on the surface of immune cells called T cells recognize and bind to partner proteins on other cells, such as some tumor cells. These proteins are called immune checkpoint proteins. When the checkpoint and partner proteins bind together, they send an “off” signal to the T cells. This can prevent the immune system from destroying the cancer.