Chemotherapy has long been used to fight cancer. But as everyone knows, it is far from the gold standard of treatment. Researchers around the world are actively exploring new ways to combat the disease. Exciting developments are currently underway, most notably in an area of treatment known as immunotherapy, the subject of this post.

First, some quick background. Our immune system is programmed to recognize anything that shouldn’t be inside our bodies, including pathogens like harmful bacteria and viruses but also cancerous tumors. Once these elements are detected, the immune system swings into action, using different pathways to attack the intruders and eradicate them. Most of time, it does a wonderful job, considering how exposed we are to things that could potentially cause a lot of damage to our health. Still, it isn’t a hundred percent perfect. Finding ways to bolster the immune system’s ability to fight diseases has the promise of transforming whole areas of medicine.

Two approaches in immunotherapy have attracted a good deal of attention lately. One is Immune Checkpoint Therapy. As mentioned, the immune system is programmed to fix a problem – to kill an infection, say – and then withdraw. Think if our immune system as a fire brigade. Once it has put out a fire, there’s no point in continuing to spray water over the ashes. Hence, it has inbuilt signals telling it when to stop fighting and wait for the next crisis. Unfortunately, cancers have learned to exploit this by sending false signals that fool the immune system into retiring prematurely. Checkpoint therapy overrides these stop signals. The therapy works remarkably well with some cancers, such as melanoma, kidney cancer, bladder urothelial cancers and classical Hodgkin Lymphoma (a type of blood cancer), though the success rate is highly variable across individuals and there are side effects.

Another type of immunotherapy is called T-cell Transfer Therapy. Naturally occurring cancer-fighting T-cells often exist in numbers too small to beat a growing tumor. Moreover, cancerous tumors often evade detection and T-cells that have been fighting them can be exhausted. The idea behind T-cell transfer therapy is to grow millions to billions of these cells in a lab, then transfer them to the body like a massively reinforced army to overwhelm the cancer. The strategy works really well against some leukaemias but it kills healthy white blood cells as well, leaving the patient vulnerable to infections.

While neither of the above immunotherapies are perfect, scientists are expressing a new wave of optimism as major advancements in immunotherapy currently take center stage. In 2011, the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of advanced cervical cancer, a move that marked a significant milestone in the field. Fast forward to 2025, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) has granted 156 cancer immunotherapy approvals and there are more to come. In fact, 2026 is proving to be a pivotal year for immunotherapy advances to overcome roadblocks like solid tumor resistance and immunosuppressive barriers. Among these advances are the increasing use of bioengineering and computational techniques such as nanotechnology for more precise drug delivery and AI for the optimal design of “smart” nanocarriers to improve patient treatment response rates (see reference below).

Reference:

Untack Cho et al., “Advances in improving cancer immunotherapy with nanotechnology: from smart nanoparticles to synergistic combination strategies,” Molecular Cancer, July, 2026 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13419314/)

WATCH