What is immunotherapy and can it cure peanut allergies and help treat cancer?
IMMUNOTHERAPY is a treatment that uses the body’s natural defences to fend off disease.
Often used to fight cancer, it helps boost the sufferer’s immune system using antibodies already developed in the body at a laboratory.
These can then be used by the immune system to attack cancerous cells.
Explaining the benefits of the treatment, Dr Áine McCarthy, Cancer Research UK’s senior science information officer, said: “Immunotherapy drugs are showing great promise for several types of cancer, particularly advanced skin cancer.
“The next steps will be to find out why they don’t work for all patients and how to limit the side effects they can cause.”
It is also used to slowly build up the body’s ability to combat the effects of allergies.
Scientists recently announced that immunotherapy trials had successfully cured children of peanut allergies.
This worked by giving toddlers a tiny amount of peanut protein and gradually increasing the dose.
Immunotherapy has it roots in the science of immunology – the practise of boosting the immune system to fight disease.
The most famous example of the treatment is the work of Brit Edward Jenner – who developed the world’s first vaccine in the late 18th-century.
Jenner noticed that milkmaids never suffered from the deadly and widespread smallpox disease.
Realising this may be a result of the maids carrying a strand of the less-harmful cowpox, he infected eight-year-old James Phipps with the virus.
The youngster subsequently proved immune to smallpox, paving the way for the world’s first vaccination.
The term ‘vacca’ comes from the Latin word for cow.
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