Immunotherapy for Cancer

Cancer is a global health crisis, with diagnoses and deaths predicted to increase significantly in the next few decades. Immunotherapy for cancer could be the answer to treating this complex and devastating disease, using the patient's own immune system to attack their cancer cells.

In this article, we’re answering your questions about immunotherapy for cancer, discussing our own cancer immunotherapy research here at Audax Biosciences, and exploring the potential of cancer immunotherapy to transform the lives of patients with cancer.

Understanding Immunotherapy for Cancer: The Basics

Just like cancer itself, immunotherapy is complex. Let’s investigate the basics:

• What is immunotherapy for cancer?
• How does immunotherapy for cancer work?
• What are the advantages of immunotherapy over traditional cancer treatments?
• What are the potential side effects of immunotherapy?
• What are the different types of cancer immunotherapy?

What is immunotherapy for cancer?

Immunotherapy refers to treatments that harness the body’s own immune system to fight diseases, including cancer. While it’s only in the last few decades that cancer immunotherapies have become widely used, the first cancer immunotherapy dates back to the late 1800s.

How does immunotherapy for cancer work?

Immunotherapy treats cancer in two main ways: it can strengthen the immune system so it better detects and destroys cancer cells, or it can remove the shields that cancers use to hide from the immune system.

In a healthy person, the immune system is constantly dealing with threats – infection by bacteria or viruses or invasion by parasites – and it usually does an excellent job at keeping us safe. The “front-line soldiers” of the immune system – cytotoxic lymphocytes – are experts at recognising the differences between the body’s own healthy cells and these dangerous invaders and killing the latter.

But because cancer cells develop from the healthy cells of our own body, they are a bit trickier for these cytotoxic lymphocytes to recognise. To make things harder, cancer cells often exploit these signals to escape recognition by the immune system. Cancer immunotherapy restores the ability of the immune system to recognise cancer cells as dangerous and supercharges the cytotoxic lymphocytes so they are more efficient at killing them.

What are the advantages of immunotherapy over traditional cancer treatments?

Cancer immunotherapy offers key advantages over traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. It is often more precise and more durable, offering greater potential for lifelong cures.

Let’s take chemotherapy as an example. There are different types of chemotherapy, but they all work by killing rapidly dividing cells like cancer cells. This means that they also kill healthy growing and dividing cells, such as in hair follicles. The reason chemotherapy has such significant side effects is because it is toxic to all dividing cells, including in the skin, digestive system, reproductive system, and bone marrow.

Unlike chemotherapy or radiation, immunotherapies are designed to trigger the immune system to attack cancer cells, while reducing the impacts on healthy cells. This is particularly important in treating childhood cancers, where chemotherapy typically causes long-term damage and unwanted side effects, such as infertility.

What are the potential side effects of immunotherapy?

Patients can still experience side effects when treated with immunotherapy for cancer, but these are the result of overstimulation of the immune response, rather than any toxic effects on healthy cells. Cancer immunotherapy side effects vary considerably from patient to patient and depend on the type and duration of immunotherapy.

Common side effects of immunotherapy for cancer include fatigue, headaches, skin rashes, muscle and joint aches, nausea and vomiting, and flu-like symptoms such as fever and chills. While some side effects can be severe, most are quite manageable.

What are the different types of cancer immunotherapy?

There are now many kinds of immunotherapy for cancer that work in different ways. The specific type of cancer will determine which immunotherapy drugs may be the most effective. Cancer immunotherapy may be administered on its own or in combination with other cancer drugs. In some cases, multiple immunotherapies will be used.

Let’s take a look at the different types of immunotherapy for cancer and how they work:

• Cancer vaccines: Cancer vaccines train the immune system to destroy cancer by teaching immune cells to recognise cancer cells as dangerous. These vaccines can help to prevent cancer, or treat it once it’s developed.
• Monoclonal antibodies: Monoclonal antibodies are special proteins produced in the lab that will bind to their matching partner proteins on either immune cells or cancer cells to stimulate an immune response against the cancer cells . There are many different types of monoclonal antibodies with different functions.
• Cellular immunotherapies: Cellular immunotherapies involve taking a patient’s own immune cells or cells from a healthy donor, growing them in large numbers, and administering them as a “living drug” to attack cancer cells. The cells can be modified in the lab to improve their ability to recognize cancer cells or increase their anti-cancer activity. Types of cellular immunotherapies for cancer include tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, and natural killer cell therapy.
• Immune checkpoint inhibitors: Immune checkpoint inhibitors are a class of monoclonal antibodies designed to treat cancers that have found a way to escape from the immune system. This type of therapy switches immune cells back “on”, restoring their ability to recognise and kill cancer cells. Immune checkpoint inhibitors are currently the most widely used type of cancer immunotherapy.
• Cytokine therapy: Cytokines are the messengers of the immune system, allowing immune cells to communicate and controlling immune responses. Cytokine therapy involves using synthetic cytokines to activate the immune response against cancer.
• Oncolytic viruses: Oncolytic viruses infect cancer cells in a specific manner. By injecting cancers with oncolytic viruses, the cancer cells will die and trigger an immune response. Oncolytic viruses can also be modified to deliver specific genes into cancer cells that will encourage the immune system to attack them.
• Multi-specific immune engagers: Immune engagers, or multi-specific antibodies, are designed to bind to two or more target proteins on both cancer cells and immune cells. They act as a bridge, forcing the immune cell and cancer cell together and helping immune cells find and kill cancer cells that they otherwise might not have detected

Can Immunotherapy Cure Cancer?

Now that we’ve explored the basics of immunotherapy, how it works and its advantages over other common cancer treatments, you’re likely asking the obvious question: can immunotherapy cure cancer? In some cases, the answer is yes, but it’s not so simple. Let’s explore the effectiveness of immunotherapy for cancer and how we’re creating safer, more powerful cancer immunotherapies here at Audax Biosciences.

How effective is immunotherapy for cancer?

While immunotherapy is becoming increasingly common, it can’t treat all types of cancer. For some cancers, even the best immunotherapy won’t work. In the case of solid cancers like lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer, what really determines if immunotherapy will work is whether the cancer is “hot” or “cold”.

When it comes to being found by the immune system, many cancers are “cold”. This means that they have very few or no immune cells and can therefore fly under the radar of the immune system, evading detection and growing unchecked. For this reason, they are extremely unlikely to respond to common cancer immunotherapies like immune checkpoint inhibitors.

One of the key goals in the cancer immunotherapy field is to “heat up” these cold cancers, allowing them to be recognized by the immune system, increasing their infiltration by cytotoxic lymphocytes, and making them sensitive to immunotherapies. At Audax Biosciences, this is one of our major areas of research and innovation.

Next-generation immunotherapy for cancer: cytokine checkpoint inhibitors and more

Here at Audax Biosciences, our goal is to create effective cancer immunotherapies that can treat a broad range of solid cancers, including “cold” tumours, while avoiding harmful side effects. To that end, we are pursuing multiple avenues of research , including next-generation cytokine therapies, cytokine checkpoint inhibitors, and cellular immunotherapies.

DAX-044 is our most advanced therapeutic candidate, based on the powerful interleukin-12 (IL-12) cytokine. With potent anti-cancer activity, persistence within the body, and an improved therapeutic window – meaning that it will be active against cancer cells before causing significant side effects – DAX-044 is poised to revolutionise cancer treatment, “heating up” cold tumours that do not respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

We are also advancing additional programs using our proprietary Avikine® platform, which enables precise control of immune‑modulating cytokines. Beyond DAX‑044, Audax is applying this platform to multiple targets to develop next‑generation immunotherapies. The most crucial aspect of our research is that we are generating treatments that can overcome immune roadblocks across a variety of cancer types. Our multi-disciplinary approach and advanced discovery platform allow us to pursue any potential target in any immune cell type to achieve this goal.

Cancer Immunotherapy: Learn More

Cancer immunotherapies have enormous potential, but more research and innovation are needed before these treatments may be able to cure all types of cancer. Fortunately, we’re seeing massive progress in this area – in the last decade alone, new tools have become available that can help us generate more effective immunotherapies for cancer, including artificial intelligence and CRISPR gene editing. To learn more about cancer immunotherapy research, the Cancer Research Institute’s website has detailed information and FAQs .

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to explore the rest of our News area for more information on cancer research and our own approach to immunotherapy for cancer.