Unlike traditional cancer treatments, cell therapy doesn’t fight metastatic tissue by killing off all cells in a given area. Rather, it uses donated cells that are carefully engineered to avoid rejection by a patient’s own immune system. Once these cells are injected into a patient’s bloodstream, they’ll track down tumors and consume them by breaking the tissue down into component molecules.
Research is ongoing in the field, but most trials have been very promising so far. Scientific press reporters have claimed that cell therapy could actually work in cases where radiation and surgical interventions haven’t. Though no one case can be considered average, that does give hope to those who may have struggled with existing treatment options.
A New Kind of Immunotherapy
According to some specialists, patients who do well with cell treatments could cut down the length of chemotherapy by as much as two full years. It’s assumed that those who catch breast cancer before it completely metastasizes would stand a better chance of recovering by way of cell therapy, but it’s also showing quite a bit of promise for those who have large tumors that have begun to spread to other areas of healthy tissue. White blood cells attack any tissue that it considers a foreign invader to the body. If these modified cells come across free radicals that could eventually turn cancerous, then they’ll usually consume them along with the breast cancer tissue they were engineered to fight. That makes it far more effective than old-style immunotherapy treatments, which normally involve simply boosting a patient’s own immune system with a series of measured doses.
Discovering New Forms of Immunity
Drug discovery is a complicated process that involves guessing what molecules might make a cell more effective at breaking down cancerous tissue. By using machine learning as well as generative artificial intelligence services, biomedical researchers have found several new types of immunity that simply weren’t understood a few years ago. They’ve shared this information with those in the oncology field, who’ve applied it by creating even stronger cells that take out parts of the body they’re programmed to attack.
One of the big problems with chemotherapy is that it’s very hard to target specific areas. It has a tendency to destroy large amounts of healthy tissue while simultaneously attacking tumors. Cells can functionally be grown in such a way that they only ever touch other cells that have a specific protein matrix on their membranes. That gives doctors the freedom to customize treatment options for individual patients. Contemporary models have usually only allowed doctors to select from a set of one-size-fits-all therapies that certainly aren’t right for every patient.
Over the next few years, these innovative drug discovery platforms could devise a wide variety of additional ways to deploy cell therapy techniques that aren’t even imagined. In the meantime, the ones currently in use should offer hope to a number of patients dealing with metastatic breast cancer.
If you have metastatic breast cancer, speak to your healthcare provider to see if cell therapy is an option for you.
