Cancer patients, until recently, were mostly treated with surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy or combinations of these. But in the last decade many examples of a new class of cancer drugs – immunotherapies – have given new hope to patients with some of the most intractable cancers. Between 2015 and 2017 alone 15 new immunotherapies were approved, including two (Keytruda and Opdivo) used to tackle eight different cancers.
Immunotherapies are the most promising new cancer treatments since chemotherapies were developed in the late 1940s. These act by enabling the body’s immune system to identify cancerous cells and attack them. This is key, since cancer cells have the unfortunate ability either to evade detection by the immune system or to impede its response. The most important class of immunotherapies are currently checkpoint inhibitors.
We all have checkpoints as part of our immune system. They prevent an immune response from being so strong that it
