There are many well-known side effects to cancer treatments, such as hair loss, nausea, pain, or fatigue. In rare cases, however, patients can experience a new side effect: a different cancer. The article “Rare side effects of cancer immunotherapy” by Anne Grimm of the Universität Leipzig discusses how new research shows that immunotherapy cancer treatments can trigger lymphoma to develop from modified T cells.
As we learned in AP Bio and by the Cleveland Clinic, immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that utilizes your body’s immune system to detect and eliminate cancer cells. Your immune system recognizes and eliminates invaders, including malignant, cancerous cells. Similar to what we learned in class, the cells injected into the cancer patient undergo mitosis to rapidly divide for the patient to have as many cancer-killing cells in their body. Unlike these healthy cells, cancer cells are caused by uncontrolled mitosis, where cells divide uncontrollably due to mutations. While healthy cells go through checkpoints to ensure proper division, cancer cells bypass the checkpoints, allowing mutated cells to continue to divide.
The article describes a specific case where the genetically altered T cells in a 63-year-old patient developed T cell lymphoma following CAR-T treatment. According to the NIH (National Cancer Institute) CAR-T treatment is “A type of treatment in which a patient’s T cells (a type of immune system cell) are changed in the laboratory so they will attack cancer cells.” Researchers discovered that the tumor was caused by the CAR-T cell alteration and underlying alterations in the patient’s hematopoietic stem cells. They examined signaling networks and genomic alterations using next-generation sequencing.
While these side effects only occur in around 1% of patients who undergo CAR-T treatment, researchers are studying similar cases to examine the risks of immunotherapy. The article ends by describing new studies being conducted by research to ensure the well-being of the patient’s health after receiving immunotherapy, as it is becoming a more common treatment for cancer. To stress the urgency of the research, the author describes how, to begin a study, researchers must typically wait several weeks or months for approval and publication. Consequently, this study was accepted after no longer than a day due to its importance.
When first learning about immunotherapy in AP Bio, I thought it sounded almost to good to be true. However, after reading this article, I discovered that in some rare cases, immunotherapy can do more harm than good. This leaves me with some questions: Do you think researchers should spend time and money studying something so rare? Could early screening methods help predict and prevent these rare complications before treatment begins?
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