Welcome!
As a formal introduction, my name is Shreeya Desai and I am a senior here, at Basis Phoenix, and I am researching on Triggering an Effective Immune Response in Cancer Therapy. My motivation to delve into this area stems from recognizing the potential of harnessing the body’s immune system to combat cancer. My envisioned research aims to understand the underlying mechanisms governing immunotherapy and its potential implications in cancer therapy, while contributing to the scientific community by shedding light on novel targets or strategies that can augment research promoting an anti-tumor immune response in the body.
In this project, I’m focusing specifically on cancer immunotherapy, a therapy used to treat cancer patients that harnesses the immune system to recognize and eliminate cancer cells by using checkpoint inhibitors. Checkpoint inhibitors are proteins that prevent an immune response from being so strong that it destroys healthy cells in the body. The immunotherapy drugs block the checkpoint proteins from binding with their partner proteins, which turns “off” the resistance of the immune system, allowing the T cells to kill cancer cells (National Cancer Institute, 2022).
Immunotherapy is unique in its own way, because it takes advantage of your own body and doesn’t rely on other drugs or external factors as treatments. Unlike chemo and antibiotics, malignant cells are less likely to develop any resistance to immunotherapy and thus have gained more regulatory approvals for clinical use. This methodology also provides more insights into each patient’s individual cancer, which doctors can then use to determine the approach most likely to benefit a particular person.
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