A man like a long-lived organism has excellent antitumor defense . Year after year, our immune system disrupts without our knowledge the tumors arising in our body. Only when it is bad and the tumor "does not catch", we will get cancer. Therefore, cancer can be considered as immune failure.
The thing is even clearer when we realize that children with congenital immune deficiency (such as the famous "bubble baby") dying for cancer at an early age, even when doctors, with the help of a bubble and antibiotics, will be able to protect them from a fatal infection to which would normally die.
It is therefore understandable that immunostimulatory adaptogens have a chance to influence the course of the cancer.
and thus assign the work to the immune system that normally destroys the malignant tumors that are constantly arising in our body both on the running belt. If any of the emerging cancer can escape, we may even die of cancer. This is the principle of tumor risk after irradiation.
How immunotherapy works
However, these methods fail with extensive metastases. In these cases, there is nowadays biological treatment (bio-therapy), more correctly immunological treatment.
In chemotherapy, it is sometimes possible to partially protect healthy cells by targeted perfusion of affected organs (since the 1950s) or by bone marrow autotransplantation.
Immunotherapy for cancer is nothing new. There has long been an effort to create anticancer vaccines. Here, however, is the problem that the patient's own immune system is usually heavily damaged by cytostatic therapy. In today's immunotherapy, therefore, anti-cancer cells are artificially produced and administered to the patient in-house. But this is not a miraculous method. The physician actually imitates the patient's immune system, and in this case faces a challenge in which the natural immunity has failed once.
I consider it very appropriate to combine antibodies with α-radioisotopes, which then locally irradiate small tumorous deposits (targeted alpha therapy). Targeted alpha therapy has been devoted, for example, to No. 3 of Current Radiopharmaceuticals of September 2008 , from specific publications such as Tolmachev2007rth (lutetium 177 + HER2 antibodies against breast cancer ) and Liepe2009a2a (Alpharadine, Prostate Cancer Radiation 223). Research activity is progressing intensively in this field, see Gudkov2016trt for a review.