Cancer isn't just one disease, it's a large group of diseases, affecting different organs and different body systems. While research is moving forward every day towards a cure, there are some recent developments that are worth keeping an eye on. T-cell therapy or immunotherapy is getting a lot of buzz for how it kills cancer cells and leaves healthy cells alone. Teams from the US, the UK, Denmark and Germany have all made revolutionary discoveries in this area. Given what we know about T-cells, treatments in the future could be either targeted T-cell production to fight disease or personalized vaccines to prevent them.
Outcomes are looking better with these new developments as well. In trial at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, 93% of patients who underwent a targeted immunotherapy protocol went into complete remission. While these results are encouraging, the field of targeted T-cells and immunotherapy has mostly been small scale studies and much more work needs to be done.