These articles you have posted are news stories about research that is ongoing, that isn't the same as information about something that could actually be used in a patient today. There are hundreds of ideas about ways to interfere with the cascade of events in a cell that leads to malignancy. About 25 or so are in active clinical trials in humans, and finally out of the realm of animal testing. But the bench of immunotherapy tools that are through the clinical trial phase is still not very deep.

And we are still trying to understand what happens when we use them in some combination to see if multiple mechanisms of impact can be combined. The risk in all this is that the immune system is a very powerful part of us. It is capable of causing life altering and even life ending reactions in us on its own when it gets out of hand.

Guillain-Barre syndrome is a disease for instance that occurs mostly in young girls, in which they loose the use of their lower limbs, and end up wheelchair bound. It is idiopathic, meaning we don't know why it starts to occur. But we do know what is happening. The patients own immune system starts to attack the peripheral nerves and destroys their ability to send the appropriate signals to the muscles involved. This can happen in some patients using one of the immune checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy drugs used in head and neck; patients can spontaneously develop Guillain-Barre. Because immune check point inhibitors take down the barriers that keep the immune system in control (so that it is strong and can attack via certain pathways the cancers) it starts attacking everything. While this is a relatively rare level three adverse event, it does occur. So there is still, even in the monoclonal antibodies that we use, lots of unknowns when it comes to any individual patients response.

The media is littered with lots of hopeful articles about things that might be a workable idea. The issue is that the testing involved is lengthy and has a dedicated path it must follow to ensure that when we use it in humans and not mice.... it does what it is supposed to do, nothing else.