Immunotherapy Treated Patient Samples

Immunotherapy Overview

Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that engages the immune system to fight the disease. It is is a type of cancer treatment that boosts the body’s natural defenses to fight cancer. It uses substances made by the body or in a laboratory to improve how your immune system works to find and destroy cancer cells.

This type of cancer treatment helps the immune system fight cancer. The immune system helps your body fight infections and other diseases. It is made up of white blood cells, multiple organs and tissues of the lymph system.

The treatment can boost the immune system or change how it functions, enabling it to find and attack cancer cells in the body. Immunotherapy is a type of biological therapy, which is a type of treatment that uses substances made from living organisms to treat cancer.

Immune System

The immune system consists of a complex process the body uses to fight illness. Our immune system is made up of various organs, antibodies (proteins) and immune cells that work together to fight disease and infections. Immune cells include:

B-cell lymphocytes: These white blood cells produce infection-fighting antibodies.
T-cell lymphocytes: These white blood cells target and destroy diseased cells. T-cells also alert other cells to the presence of diseased or foreign cells.
Dendritic cells: These immune cells interact with T-cells to stimulate an immune system response.
Granulocytes: These white blood cells including neutrophils, eosinophils and basophils, fight infections.

How Immunotherapy Works

A person’s immune system detects and destroys abnormal cells. It also prevents or curbs the growth of many cancers.

Immune cells can be present in and around tumors. These cells are called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and can be a sign that the immune system is responding to the cancer.

The immune system can prevent and slow cancer growth. However, cancer cells can have genetic changes that make them less visible to the immune system.

Cancer cells may also have proteins on their surface that can turn off immune cells. Others can change the normal cells around the tumor, causing them to interfere with how the immune system works.

Immunotherapy helps the immune system to be more effective when responding to cancer cells.

Some immunotherapy drugs block the immune checkpoints, which usually prevent a person’s immune system from responding too strongly.

Blocking these checkpoints allows the immune cells to respond more strongly than normal to cancer cells.

Other immunotherapy drugs boost the immune cells’ natural ability to deal with cancer cells.

Immunotherapy Medication

There are a number of immunotherapy drugs that work in different ways. Following are several main types of immunotherapy used to treat cancer:

Checkpoint inhibitors: These drugs basically take the ‘brakes’ off the immune system, which helps it recognize and attack cancer cells.

Checkpoint inhibitors are MABs that work by helping the immune system attack cancer cells. Cancer can sometimes push a stop button on the immune cells, so the immune system won’t attack them. Checkpoint inhibitors block cancers from pushing the stop button.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy: This therapy takes some T-cells from a patient’s blood, mixes them with a special virus that makes the T-cells learn how to attach to tumor cells, and then gives the cells back to the patient so they can find, attach to, and kill the cancer.

This treatment changes the genes in a patients’s white blood cells (T cells) to help them recognize and kill cancer cells. Changing the T cell in this way is called genetically engineering the T cell.

It is available as a possible treatment for some children with leukemia and some adults with lymphoma. Patients with other types of cancer might have it as part of a clinical trial.

Cytokines: This treatment uses cytokines (small proteins that carry messages between cells) to stimulate the immune cells to attack cancer.

Cytokines are a group of proteins in the body that play an important part in boosting the immune system.

Interferon and interleukin are types of cytokines found in the body. Scientists have developed man made versions of these to treat some types of cancer.

Immunomodulators: This group of drugs generally boosts parts of the immune system to treat certain types of cancer.

Cancer vaccines: Vaccines are substances put into the body to start an immune response against certain diseases. We usually think of them as being given to healthy people to help prevent infections. But some vaccines can help prevent or treat cancer.

Researchers are looking at whether vaccines can help the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells. In the same way that vaccines work against diseases, the vaccines are made to recognize proteins that are on particular cancer cells.

This helps the immune system to recognize and mount an attack against those particular cancer cells.

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs or MoAbs): These are man-made versions of immune system proteins. mAbs can be very useful in treating cancer because they can be designed to attack a very specific part of a cancer cell.

Antibodies are found naturally in our blood and help us to fight infection. MAB therapies mimic natural antibodies but are made in a laboratory. Monoclonal means all one type. So each MAB therapy is a lot of copies of one type of antibody.

MABs recognise and attach to specific proteins on the surface of cancer cells. Many different MABs are available to treat cancer. They work in different ways and some work in more than one way.

MABs work as an immunotherapy in different ways. They might do one of the following:

Trigger the immune system
Help the immune system to attack cancer

Oncolytic viruses: This treatment uses viruses that have been modified in a lab to infect and kill certain tumor cells.

Administering Immunotherapy

Doctors and healthcare professionals administer immunotherapy in the following ways:

Through an IV
In a tablet form
As a topical cream
Through a catheter into the bladder

Side Effects of Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy can also cause a variety of side effects. These often occur when the body’s immune response is dramatically increased in order to deal with the cancer.

Some of the common side effects of immunotherapy include the following:

Breathing problems
Chills
Dizziness
Fatigue
Fever
Headaches
High or low blood pressure
Joint pain
Muscle aches
Nausea
Vomiting
Weakness

Other less common side effects of immunotherapy include the following:

Diarrhea
Fluid retention
Heart palpitations
Inflammation in organs
Increased risk of infection
Swelling
Sinus congestion
Weight gain

Immunotherapy to Treat Cancer

Immunotherapy can treat many types of cancer.

Doctors can use immunotherapy:

To shrink a tumor before surgery
Post surgery, to remove remaining cancer cells and delay or prevent a recurrence
During remission to remove remaining cancer cells and delay or prevent a recurrence
In the later stages of cancer to slow its progression and reduce symptoms

While doctors do not use immunotherapy as widely as chemotherapy it is also a common treatment for almost all cancer types.

Types of Cancer Treated by Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy treats different types of cancers , including but not limited to the following:

Duration of Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy maybe administered daily, weekly, monthly or in a cycle. With cyclic immunotherapy, patients take a rest period after treatment. The break gives the body time to produce healthy cells. Treatment length depends on the following factors:

Cancer type and stage
Type of immunotherapy drug
Patients body’s response to treatment

Post Immunotherapy Treatment

Unlike chemotherapy, immunotherapy may not always cause tumor shrinkage. Rarely, tumors temporarily swell or get bigger as immune cells attack the cancer even when patients are feeling great.

This phenomenon is known as pseudoprogression. The term means that a tumor only appears to be worsening and patients may still be deriving benefit.

You’ll need to see your healthcare provider often to track treatment response. You may have frequent physical exams, blood tests and imaging scans.

Potential Risks and Complications of Immunotherapy

Side effects from immunotherapy vary depending on the drug and cancer types. Patients may experience the following:

Altered mental status
Bone or muscle pain
Chills
Colitis
Diarrhea
Fatigue
Fever
Flu like symptoms
Headache
Infusion-related reactions
Loss of appetite
Mouth sores
Pneumonitis
Skin rash
Shortness of breath

Effectiveness of Immunotherapy

Success rates for any cancer treatment, including immunotherapy, depend on individual factors, including the cancer type and stage. In general, immunotherapy is effective against many cancers.

While some cancers are more immunogenic than others, in general, immunotherapy is effective across a wide variety of cancers. Immunotherapy can produce durable responses unlike chemotherapy or radiation therapy, however, these occur only in around 25% patients.

Some research suggests that the immune system may remember cancer cells after immunotherapy ends.

Bay Biosciences is a global leader in providing researchers with high quality, clinical grade, fully characterized human tissue samples, bio-specimens and human bio-fluid collections.

Samples available are cancer (tumor) tissue, cancer serum, cancer plasma cancer PBMC and human tissue samples from most other therapeutic areas and diseases.

Bay Biosciences maintains and manages its own bio-repository, human tissue bank (biobank) consisting of thousands of diseased samples (specimens) and from normal healthy donors available in all formats and types.

Our biobank procures and stores fully consented, deidentified and institutional review boards (IRB) approved human tissue samples and matched controls.

All our human tissue collections, human specimens and human bio-fluids are provided with detailed samples associated patient’s clinical data.

This critical patient’s clinical data includes information relating to their past and current disease, treatment history, lifestyle choices, biomarkers and genetic information.

Patient’s data is extremely valuable for researchers and is used to help identify new effective treatments (drug discovery & development) in oncology, other therapeutic areas and diseases.

Bay Biosciences banks wide variety of human tissue samples and biological samples including cryogenically preserved at – 80°C.

Including fresh frozen tissue samples, tumor tissue samples, FFPE’s, tissue slides, with matching human bio-fluids, whole blood and blood derived products such as serum, plasma and PBMC’s.

Bay Biosciences is a global leader in collecting and providing human tissue samples according to the researchers specified requirements and customized, tailor-made collection protocols.

Please contact us anytime to discuss your special research projects and customized human tissue sample requirements.

Bay Biosciences provides human tissue samples (human specimens) from diseased and normal healthy donors which includes:

Peripheral whole-blood,
Amniotic fluid
Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BAL)
Sputum
Pleural effusion
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)
Serum (sera)
Plasma
Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC’s)
Saliva
Buffy coat
Urine
Stool samples
Aqueous humor
Vitreous humor
Kidney stones (renal calculi)
Other bodily fluids from most diseases including cancer.

We can also procure most human bio-specimens and can-do special collections and requests of human samples that are difficult to find. All our human tissue samples are procured through IRB approved clinical protocols and procedures.

In addition to the standard processing protocols Bay Biosciences can also provide human plasma, serum, PBMC bio-fluid samples using custom processing protocols, you can buy donor specific sample collections in higher volumes and specified sample aliquots from us.

Bay Biosciences also provides human samples from normal healthy donors, volunteers, for controls and clinical research, contact us Now.

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