TKS Immunotherapies Module Wrap Up

I finished the TKS Immunotherapies Explore Module, and here are some of the things I learned.

Immunotherapies utilize the cells in our immune system to fight diseases and bad cells in our bodies rather than using treatments and medicines that were made from scratch. Think of this as a branch off personalized medicine while utilizing genomics as well. Here are some examples of different therapies being developed:

CAR-T cell therapy works by taking the T-cells in your body and updating their receptors to better target and identify the specific cell your body needs to destroy.

CAR-NK cell therapy is similar to CAR-T cell therapy, only these cells have more receptors. This allows them to identify a wider range of different indicators on the cells your body is trying to target, compared to the CAR-T cells that can only identify the one specific indicator their receptor is meant for identifying.

TIL therapy takes the T-cells in your body that have interacted with the target disease cell and multiplies their numbers greatly in a lab. They take those newly larger groups of T-cells and inject them back into your body, with the end result being that there are more T-cells in your body that recognize the target disease cell, which means that there will be more T-cells attacking it.

These therapies utilize other fields such as personalized medicine, genomics, gene editing and gene engineering, and more, which shows just how vast and developed this new treatment is becoming.

Immunotherapies can prove to be a more efficient and safer way of treating patients because we are only manipulating and utilizing the tools that our bodies gave us, rather than creating whole new treatments from scratch that may not even work with your body the right way.

I still have some more time until I have to choose my focus, so there is still a little bit of learning left to do before then!

Photo credit: https://lnkd.in/g9nbAmse