Hi, I'm Dr. Julie Brahmer.
I'm a medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins.
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Lung cancer's the leading cause of cancer-related deaths.
In fact, lung cancer kills more patients than breast cancer,
colon cancer, and ovarian cancer combined.
Lung cancer affects both smokers as well as non-smokers.
Immunotherapy is a promising new treatment for lung cancer.
In some cases, it can actually extend patients' lives.
Now let me go to the toy box and tell you more about it.
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So I'm gonna use finger-paints today to help explain how
the immune system and the cancer interact.
So this is your cancer cell.
And this is your T cell, which is an important cell in your body that
helps control and fight cancer.
The cancer cell actually excretes abnormal proteins that
are then taken up by another immune cell called the dendritic cell.
This cell processes these proteins, And
presents them to the T cell so that the T cell can recognize the cancer.
Then the T cell can go in and kill the cancer.
But unfortunately, the cancer cell can do various things to try to
prevent the immune system from attacking it.
By excreting different cytokines or
even putting up a shield called a checkpoint.
To explain the next idea, let's push this aside and
talk about what a checkpoint is.
A checkpoint pathway is what our body normally uses
to control its immune system.
There are several checkpoint pathways that our body uses.
The pathway that we know most about is called the PD-1 pathway.
And we're gonna use a set of lock and keys to be able to explain this.
This toy, actually, you can put the key in and
unlock, and we can use this to explain the checkpoint pathways.
So our immune system has checkpoint pathways to control itself.
Normally, proteins can bind to a receptor and
then unlock this lock and cause the immune system to be controlled.
There's various different checkpoint pathways that we have here
that help control the immune system.
The one pathway that we know most about is called the PD-1 pathway.
This pathway, actually, is used by cancer cells.
The cancer cells express the protein.
The T cells have the receptor.
They bind, Unlock that lock and
cause the T cells to be exhausted and go away.
Next, we'll use the dragon to represent the cancer cell and
these superheroes to represent the immune cells, or the T cells,
that are surrounding, The dragon and attempt to slay it.
But the dragon is really smart and uses these checkpoint
pathways, To shield itself from the immune system.
Here at Johns Hopkins and other institutions,
we've helped develop antibodies.
These antibodies are drugs that block the checkpoint pathway and
actually break down the shield, So
that your immune system can slay the dragon.
This is a real milestone for our lung cancer patients.
For some patients, they are living longer and
better lives when being treated with immunotherapy.
But unfortunately, it does not help all of our patients.
Here at John Hopkins,
we are working hard to individualize this type of treatment, to broaden
the success, in order to help all of our lung cancer patients.
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