A new method of fighting cancer is getting support from some doctors. According to an article in The Boston Globe, doctors are researching how to use the body’s own immune system to fight off cancer cells.
This immune therapy approach is called a vaccine, although it is used to treat cancer, not to prevent it. According to the Globe, experimental vaccines were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting and were targeting prostate, melanoma, and neroblastoma cancers. The Globe article said the doctors at the cancer conference said they had found a vaccine that was able to stop a form of lymphoma from getting worse for more than a year, but they couldn’t predict how long this would last. The researchers are not calling this vaccine a cure for cancer, but a possible option in treatment, according to the article,
The oncologists at the annual meeting described the immune therapy as guerilla warfare, the Globe said. They explained that the body’s immune system has problems identifying cancer cells because the cancer cells are the body’s own cells, not foreign cells like flu cells and so the immune system has trouble recognizing a problem and doesn’t immediately attack the cancer cells, according to the article.
