WARRIOR IN THE MAKING

Immunotherapy offers hope for treatment of cancers and autoimmune diseases. But there is a lot of hype, too. And, high cost and inadequate facilities, for now, make it inaccessible to most people

- NAMITA KOHLI

Its work is often described as fascinating, even elegant. And for the most part, it does its job—fighting foreign invader pathogens with an army of antibodies and killer cells and keeping us disease-free. Sometimes though, all it takes is a microscopic entity, say, a SARS-CoV-2, to throw the elegant machinery of the human immune system into a tizzy. Managing this system that has now gone into a tizzy—aka a ‘cytokine storm’—has been keeping scientists, doctors and researchers across the world rather busy. Various methods such as suppressing the system through steroids and even using a cocktail of synthetic antibodies to attack the virus are being studied furiously. It is not the first time that medical science is banking so heavily on targeting the human immune system. Inside laboratories and hospital settings, evidence around targeting the immune system for new treatment modalities, or what is broadly known as immunotherapy, is mounting. The idea, say experts, is fairly simple—the root cause of several diseases lies in immune dysfunction. By stimulating or suppressing specific mechanisms within the system, zeroing in on specific targets, and even using synthetic, lab-generated antibodies, scientists, researchers and clinicians are hoping to find a cure for, or in many cases at least better manage, several diseases, ranging from cancers, autoimmune diseases and infections to heart disease and diabetes.