Immunotherapy treatments for cancer are medical therapy which help a person's own immune system
attack or fight the cancer they've unfortunately got. All of us have got a variety of immune
cells in our body which can detect problems like infections but they can also pick up
significant problems like cancer. The problem in the past has always been that although
the immune system's been able to detect the cancer, it's always had difficulty destroying
established tumours and these are tumours that your doctor or other healthcare professional
would have picked up. Immunotherapy treatments stimulate your own immune system to get past
these initial blocks, if you like, to attack the cancer cells and that can lead to eradication
of advanced tumours and also prevents tumours from coming back.
Immunotherapy therapy medications work in to two sorts of distinct ways. The first is:
they can stimulate your immune system to attack a cancer that it's not seen before. So, an
example for that would be a vaccine. Other immunotherapy treatments work by essentially
removing the sort of molecular camouflage, if you like, the tumours use to hide from
the immune system. An example of that would be an immune checkpoint inhibitor. Immune
checkpoint are sort of breaks, if you like, that stop the immune cells from attacking
cancer cells and when we take the breaks off using a medicine such as an antibody, that
can then stimulate your immune system to attack the cancer cells. Once that process has been
started, the immune system works a little bit like a cascade and more and more immune
cells get recruited and essentially the sort of fight is on between the tumour and the
immune system and actually as a result of these, the effect of sort of stimulating the
immune system, tumours even widely metastatic or spread tumours can be controlled and even
cured in some groups of patients.
For women who have triple negative breast cancer that's unfortunately spread away from
the breast, a new treatment is just becoming available to prescribe. The drug's called
the atezolizumab. It's given in combination with chemotherapy. What we've known for a
long time is that triple negative breast cancer responds well to chemotherapy, but the benefits
are usually short-lived. Triple negative breast cancer does have signs that the immune system
can attack it. Atezolizumab, which is an intravenous infusion given every three weeks, blocks one
of the brakes on the immune system that prevents women's breast cancer from being attacked
by their immune system. By combining atezolizumab with chemotherapy, we see increased response
rates and by that, I mean more women have their cancer shrink after treatment. Those
women who get the immunotherapy, given with the chemotherapy, live longer than those women
who don't and we know from previous experience of patients treated with immunotherapy treatments
that some patients treated with atezolizumab and chemotherapy will go on to have long term
survival in the longer run. In other words, their tumours will be controlled by the immunotherapy
and chemotherapy for the foreseeable future. It's the most exciting development in triple
negative breast cancer we've ever seen in all the time that we've been developing treatments
for this illness.
So the best available evidence for the use of immunotherapy in breast cancer is for patients
who have advanced triple negative breast cancer. A drug called atezolizumab along with chemotherapy
is being approved to prescribe for women with breast cancer. It's clearly been shown to
have a superior effectiveness over standard treatments and is one of the treatments of
the future for women with advanced breast cancer. Other forms of immunotherapy are in
development for other types of breast cancer. So it would be a good idea if you're interested
to approach your doctor or medical team who's looking after you and they can discuss what
options will be available to you in clinical trial.
So this is one of the most exciting areas in breast cancer medicine at the moment. The
woman who unfortunately develop recurrent triple negative breast cancer, we know from
the research that's been conducted so far and from the clinical trial results that some
women, about one to two women in ten who receive immunotherapy treatment will go on to have
long-term control of their cancers after the treatment. What do I mean by that? Well, we
have somebody who has a breast cancer which is growing on their scans, they receive the
immunotherapy treatment and then afterwards the cancer goes into remission or disappears.
We don't know at the moment whether these women have been cured or not, but it's certainly
one of the most exciting events or discoveries that we've seen in triple negative breast
cancer for a very long time. So I think although we can't say for certain whether a woman will
be cured, these results do offer hope to women with triple negative breast cancer that there
is the possibility of long term control of their cancers after immunotherapy treatment.