Review
Edward Jenner, William Coley, Paul Ehrlich, and Steven Rosenberg
are important names in the brief history of biological therapy
research.
Our immune system is a very important line of defense against
"foreign invaders" such as bacteria, viruses, or cancer cells.
What makes it unique is that it can recognize "foreign invaders,"
and then develop the specific weapons to fight them. Biological
therapy uses materials made by our own body or made in a laboratory
to boost, direct, or restore our body's natural defenses against
diseases such as cancer.
Two basic biological therapies exist: immunotherapy and cytotoxic
therapy. Immunotherapy uses a variety of methods and drugs
to manipulate the immune system to create a hostile environment
for the cancer in the body, while cytotoxic therapy involves
changing the cancer cells' biology so that they become weak
and die.
In biological therapy, biologically derived agents are either
used to modify the relationship between tumor and host. This
is altering the host's biologic response to tumor cells with
a resultant therapeutic effect or by activating the patient's
immune system and inducing to attack cancer cells. Common
biological agents include interferons, monoclonal antibodies,
interleukins, growth factors, and tumor vaccines. Side effects
do occur with biological therapy, but the type of effects
and severity of effects depend on each individual patient
and the drug(s) they are administered.
Bone marrow transplantation is often used to replace stem
cells destroyed by high doses of chemotherapy and/or radiation
therapy, or to directly attack the malignancy. Depending on
the donor of the bone marrow, bone marrow transplant can be
categorized as autologuous, syngeneic, or allogeneic.
Quiz
It's time to see how much you have learned from this unit.
A multiple-choice type of quiz, including eight questions,
has been created to give you an opportunity to reinforce what
you have learned.
Since the quiz is created as an incentive for learning, rather
than an objective evaluation of learning results, the score
of the quiz will not be captured and will not be recorded.
Feedback to your answer is provided in real-time, instantaneously,
so you may select another choice if your first choice is not
the correct one.
These quiz questions are grouped into four sets of two questions
each to reduce the size of the content on each page. When
you finish the questions in one set, click the navigation
arrows in the Title Bar to go to the next page. Please click
here to take the quiz.
|
