Month: November 2017

When it comes to cancer therapies, the field is abuzz with enthusiasm for treatments that rely on the patient’s own immune cells. What are T cells? Immunotherapies for cancer enlist the body’s own immune system to kill cancer cells. One such therapy, called immune checkpoint blockade, involves patients receiving a drug that reactivates a patient’s T cells, a type of white blood cell trained to recognize and attack viruses and tumors, allowing them to kill virally infected or tumor cells. These tumor-fighting T cells detect a protein, called an antigen, on the cancer cells’ surface that triggers the attack....