Current Limitations of Immunotherapy: Are There Better Options?
Immunotherapy is not the only treatment available for cancer patients, and that raises the question: of what use are the other treatments?
Does immunotherapy top the list of the cancer treatments out there, or are there better ones? Well, the answers to these questions form the content of this article, so read on to find out everything.
Current Limitations to Handle
The limitations that currently affect immunotherapy for cancer are many, but perhaps one of the biggest is the unpredictability of the treatment method.
If immunotherapy does work in a patient, the result is often exceptional compared to other treatment methods. For example, the patient would not have to take the treatment because its results last very long. The activation and strengthening of the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells is not something that will go away even after immunotherapy has been completed.
The immune system has memory cells that can remember exactly what cancer cells look like and will thus carry out an automatic attack if there is a future resurfacing of cancer. This reason, plus the fact that immunotherapy usually comes with less severe side effects (all things being equal), makes the treatment method a choice worldwide.
But remove yourself from thinking about these benefits, and the significant limitation of immunotherapy will become apparent to you again. Its unpredictability deducts enormous brownie points from its score. The doctors find it difficult to tell precisely how a patient is likely to respond to the treatment and what outcomes they are likely to get.
The high treatment costs are another huge limitation of immunotherapy. It comes down to that people are very sick and are looking for a cure very fast. There is immunotherapy which is proclaimed as a miracle treatment that can help them get better. Still, this treatment costs an arm and a leg and is inaccessible to a cancer patient who is an average earner.
The $100,000 plus for immunotherapy treatment is unheard of for many patients; very outrageous, and there goes another limitation.
This is why people are asking: are there better options apart from immunotherapy?
Are There Better Options?
Well, in this case, you can’t exactly say that there are better options because the answer is relative.
If considering better options in terms of better costs, yes, there are better options. In terms of side effects, there aren’t better options. There may be better options in terms of predictability of treatment outcome, but in terms of the durability of results, well, there’s another segment where immunotherapy takes the lead.
We will briefly compare immunotherapy with other types of cancer care to conclude whether there are better options or not.
Immunotherapy vs. chemotherapy
Chemotherapy (commonly called chemo) is a treatment type that uses drugs to inhibit the growth and division of cancer cells.
As one of the oldest forms of cancer treatment, it has also seen many successes and has had its fair share of limitations. A significant limit of chemo is that the drugs used to attack the cancer cells can also cause serious damage to healthy body cells.
Sometimes, chemo can help eradicate cancer, but many other times, all it can do is to slow down the division of cancer cells. Hormonal therapy and targeted therapy are more modern treatments that are sometimes combined with chemotherapy, but they still all have harmful side effects.
So, immunotherapy vs. chemotherapy isn’t precisely a competition because immunotherapy comes with less risk of destroying healthy cells. You can’t consider that and say chemotherapy is a better option.
Immunotherapy vs. Radiation
Radiation therapy uses high doses of radiation to target and kills cancer cells. The killing of cancer cells does not happen right away. It begins with shrinking or slowing their growth after the cancer cells have been exposed to high levels of radiation, and in days and weeks after the treatment, the cancer cells will ultimately die.
But like chemotherapy, radiation usually affects nearby cells and tissues, leading to side effects that range from mild to severe. In some patients, the side effects can get better over time as the damaged cells heal up, but others are not so lucky.
Radiation is by far one of the most effective treatment methods for cancer, with up to about a 90% success rate. Compare it again with immunotherapy, and you’ll find out that it is costly as well but not nearly as costly as immunotherapy.
Radiation’s high success rate of up to 90%, especially if the cancer is at the early stage, makes radiation a probable better option, but that depends a lot on the type and location of cancer.
Bottomline
Immunotherapy is not the only type of cancer treatment, but the curiosity is, are there better options? We have weighed immunotherapy against the other options in this article and seen that one cannot exactly say there are options better than immunotherapy because they all come with their pros and cons.
