Immunotherapy for Cancer (from Smithsonian online article)
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You may also use the running clinicaltrials.gov on our feed:
http://www.cholangiocarcinoma.org/clinicaltrials.htm
Find the search function on menu bar and type in ‘immunotherapy’. You can scroll through all discussions containing this word starting from most recent. One interesting one is the NIH TIL clinical trial which Melinda is undergoing. You will find her history there (or search TIL for all discussions related).
I found that most therapeutic/interventional CC clinical trials are at institutions back East but there may be more coming out to western research hospitals as this is becoming a hot research area that has shown promise. The problem is, cc gets lumped into drug studies for other cancers and there are few studies on cc alone. Drug companies are getting on the targeted drug (including immunotherapy drugs) bandwagon as this field is very promising.
WillowI don’t know them all but most are still investigational, not approved by the FDA for cc and therefore clinical trials are the place to look for them. Ask your oncologist. They usually require testing of your tumor biopsy tissue for specific molecular bio markers or mutations that will match with the therapy being tested. The therapies that fall under the category of immunotherapy vary greatly.
Check out clinical trials.gov and do a search
You can also use the search function on this discussion board.
Sincerely,
WillowTake that, cancer!: The War on Cancer has been going on a long time, with its share of false hopes, but a growing number of experts suggest that the fight may have turned a corner with a treatment known as cancer immunotherapy. Last month, for instance, Science magazine named it the “Breakthrough of the Year.”
So what exactly is cancer immunotherapy? Put simply, it is using drugs that spur the body’s immune system to battle tumor cells directly. The reason this doesn’t happen naturally, as researchers discovered a few years ago, is that tumor cells are able to wrap themselves in a protective shield. But new drugs are being tested that have been able to empower the immune system to break through that protection and allow the body to do its job in fighting cancer cells on its own. The number of cases where immunotherapy has been tested is still relatively small, but the results have been encouraging. And, as Jennifer Couzin-Frankel wrote in Science, “Immunotherapy marks an entirely different way of treating cancer—by targeting the immune system, not the tumor itself.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/7-medical-advances-to-watch-in-2014-180948286/#ixzz2qigGCijE
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