What are ‘checkpoint’ immunotherapy drugs?

What are ‘checkpoint’ immunotherapy drugs?

This video explains the concept of so-called ‘checkpoint’ immunotherapy drugs (also called checkpoint blockers, or checkpoint inhibitors), which work by allowing a patient’s immune system to target their cancer. Find out more about our work on immunotherapy here: http://po.st/sT0XJa and read more detail about how the drugs work, and how they were discovered, on our blog: http://po.st/wkCkoE

Our immune cells protect us from harm, patrolling our blood in search of potential problems, and travelling to sites of infection or damage

These cells need to spot the difference between health and unhealthy tissues

For example, when our cells are infected with virus, they need to be destroyed.

Infected cells display different molecules on their surface from healthy cells, indicating they’re damaged.

Immune cells can recognise these signs of disease and pass on instructions that tell the infected cell to self-destruct

But when it comes to cancer, this situation is a lot more complicated

For a tumour to grow it needs to avoid detection.

One way tumours can do this is to produce molecules that can trick the immune system

One of these is called PD-L1

It interacts with a molecule on the immune cell, telling it to ignore the cancer.

But researchers have now developed drugs to interfere with this process, allowing the immune system to attack the cancer

And for some cancers, these new immunotherapies look set to change the way the disease is treated.

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