Immunotherapy
Releasing the immune brakes — checkpoint inhibitors and engineered CAR-T cells.
Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors: Taking the Brakes Off the Immune System
For decades chemotherapy fought cancer by poisoning it — attacking the tumour directly and, too often, the patient with it. Checkpoint inhibitors do something stranger and more elegant: they don't touch the tumour at all. They un-cuff the patient's own T cells and let the immune system finish the job. The result can be a durable remission in a disease that was, a few years earlier, a death sentence. The price is a new kind of toxicity — an immune system let off the leash — and learning to manage it is the whole art.
CAR-T and Cellular Therapy: Reprogramming the Patient's Own T Cells
Every chemotherapy failed. The leukaemia kept coming back. So the team tried something that sounds like science fiction: they drew out the child's own T cells, rewrote their DNA in a lab so each one carried a receptor tuned to the cancer, grew them into an army, and gave them back. Within days the tumour was melting — and the child spiked a raging fever with crashing blood pressure. This is CAR-T: a living drug, its miracle and its signature storm.
