Immunotherapy is a fairly new development in medicine that boosts the body’s natural defense system in order to fight cancer. There are several ways to do this, including stopping/slowing the growth of cancer cells and boosting the immune system to identify and fight cancer cells. This talk was really interesting to me as a premed student and I was really impressed with GRF Shiv’s knowledge on this topic as well as his passion for this field.

I will say the talk left me a bit confused at times simply because most of the content of this table talk included very specified knowledge. That said, it only encouraged me more to look up the information afterwards, and in my own time I was able to learn more about it myself and reinforce the knowledge GRF Shiv passed on to us.

After the table talk and my own web-searching, I found out that there are many different methods of immunotherapy. Antibodies can be made in a lab and then used to detect/flag cancer cells so that the body knows to destroy them. Another interesting one was using genetically modified viruses to kill cancel cells. Finally, T-cells can be modified to treat cancer as well (CAR-T therapy). I find these developments in research to be encouraging for the future of medicine. Because there are so many different types of cancer and cancer cells vary from person to person, we’re still having trouble securing a “cure” for cancer. But perhaps the day that we do won’t be too far from now!