A patient with cancer can potentially be treated with one or more of the five pillars of cancer treatment – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, hormone therapy and targeted therapy. Now, immunotherapy can be considered part of the arsenal for some cancers.

Cancer immunotherapy consists of treatments (now mostly within clinical trials) that boost the immune system, allowing the body’s own defences to combat cancer.

Encouraging results from some landmark clinical trials in the last three to five years have demonstrated some very dramatic clinical responses in certain cancers, said Dr Toh Han Chong, Senior Consultant, Division of Medical Oncology, and Deputy Director, National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS), a member of the SingHealth group. Dr Toh is Principal Investigator of a recent immunotherapy clinical trial in Singapore.

He said that immunotherapy has emerged as a real and promising new treatment because of a much better understanding of how the immune system works, following many years of intense research into cancer immunology. Medical science now knows more about how the immune system works, and this intricate knowledge is translatable into new, more effective drugs today. A prestigious journal, Science, voted cancer immunotherapy as their overall Breakthrough of the Year in 2013.

“Cancer cells are good at disguising themselves, but new knowledge has helped us figure out how they do this in greater detail, and how we can recognise some subtle differences between cancer cells and normal cells, so as to design sophisticated immunotherapy drugs that exploit this weakness in cancer’s Achilles heel. With the use of immunotherapy, the immune system can actually recognise and combat these cancer cells in a much more precise manner now while sparing normal cells,” Dr Toh said.