When treating cancer, combining chemotherapy drugs with immunotherapy is referred to as chemoimmunotherapy.
Chemoimmunotherapy is a new cancer treatment that combines standard chemotherapy with immunotherapy. This strategy tries to improve cancer treatment efficacy by concurrently attacking cancer cells with chemotherapy and enhancing the immune system’s ability to fight cancer with immunotherapy.
However, many people are unsure whether this combined treatment is effective. Before delving into expert opinions, it’s important to understand the two types of treatments individually.
What is Chemotherapy?
It is a cancer treatment in which medications directly kill cancer cells by interfering with the cell division process.
Chemotherapy medications can not only destroy cancer cells, but they may also have additional effects. Certain medications, such as Adriamycin, have been discovered to aid in the activation of immunological responses, which can contribute to the killing of cancer cells.
This process, known as spontaneous remission of cancer or the immune response, is the foundation for the recently developed cancer treatment known as immunotherapy.
What is Immunotherapy?
Immunotherapy unlike chemotherapy does not directly kill cancer cells. Instead, these treatments are, simplistically, designed to enhance our immune system’s ability to fight cancer. It works towards building the immune system so that it can do a better job of fighting cancer. However, research is going on to make this therapy prove effective for all kinds of cancer patients.
With some tumours, it’s thought that the cancer cells don’t look abnormal enough to initiate a strong immune response. For instance, to mount the immune response to cancer, the immune system needs to see cancer or antigens on the surface of the cells.
Chemo-immunotherapy – the new treatment!
Hence, comes the role of combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Chemotherapy and immunotherapy Combination Experts believe that the combination of the two therapies will result in synergy; one treatment will enhance the effect of the other, and vice versa. In other words, the objective is combining one plus one to get four.
Both chemotherapy and immunotherapy are systemic therapies. It means that they address cancer cells wherever they happen to be in the body. These differ from local treatments such as surgery or radiation therapy. Those treatments only address cancer where it arises. They do not reach the tumour.
There are various clinical trials executed that combined immunotherapy with chemotherapy to shrink lung cancers before removing them surgically. According to findings, this combination has reduced the risk of recurrence, progression, or death by 37% compared to patients who received chemo alone.
Conclusion
A combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy should be used as first-line treatment for many patients with non-small cell lung cancer and some patients with small cell lung cancer. This is because medical experts suggest that chemotherapy if it keeps the immune system intact, can work well with immunotherapy.
