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Immune therapy is something you’ll hear a lot about. And that is basically something that uses your own lymphocytes and immune system, which it’s been doing your whole life, killing cells that could have become cancer cells. It uses those immune cells to attack the cancer. There are a bunch of stop signs that our regular cells have, but especially that our cancer cells have called PD-L1 or CTLA. These stop signs tell the immune system “Don’t attack me. I’m good.” But they’re not good. They got a cloak on and they actually have a lot of dangerous stuff underneath. When you’re giving immune therapy, you are blocking that stop sign mechanism to keep the cancer from blocking your cells to attack it. And that’s immune therapy. So when you give this drug, those stop signs go away and all of a sudden you can see significant reduction in size of those cancer cells, because that mechanism to hide from the immune system goes away. It’s starting to be used in a lot of cancer types since 2015, and it’s been a big game changer. Does it cure? No. Why? Because these cancer cells get smart and put something else to basically avoid the immune system. They say, okay, if I can’t use that, we’re all getting killed. We got to adapt really quickly. So they develop other mechanisms.
