Before this table talk, I had heard of immunotherapy in passing, but never in enough detail to truly understand what it is. And I can imagine I’m not the only one. In the most basic sense, immunotherapy is exactly what it sounds like. Therapy for the immune system. Why is this so important? Cancer is a mutation of the cells that the body’s immune system doesn’t see as a threat. So, to combat this you can either use outside methods to kill the cells, or have the body’s built in mechanisms take care of the problem. Immunotherapy takes the latter approach to eliminating cancer by having the body learn to defend itself.

During the Talk, two main types of immunotherapy were discussed. One where the natural “stop signals” in the immune system are dampened so that it actually attacks the cancer cells and another where the entire immune system is put through a “re-education”, so that it knows how to handle cancer cells. The latter is much more expensive, since it essentially involves draining a person of all immune cells and teaching those cells via machine, while the former process merely involves a drug that can be purchased at a pharmacy.

If it still seems a little complicated, the most boiled down version is this: imagine being able to treat cancer with a drug that can be bought at the pharmacy. For such a life altering disease, this seems ludicrous, but that may not be the case in a few years time. There are already a number of these drugs in testing for a multitude of cancers. There probably isn’t a single person in America who isn’t affected by cancer in some form. For me personally, I lost my Great Aunt to brain cancer a few years back. While the early form of these drugs may not be able to treat very serious conditions, they’ll do a tremendous amount for a significant portion of the population.