For many cancers, immunotherapy is effective and can improve your life and extend your life expectancy. What is immunotherapy? When a cell in your body becomes cancerous, the disease is likely to begin. Immunotherapy can use your body’s natural defenses to fight cancer cells, just as it does to kill bacteria and viruses. One way is for your immune system to mount an all-out attack on the cancer cells, and the other is to boost your own defenses. What types of cancer immunotherapy are available? Relay T-cell immunotherapy Identifying the T cells that best fight tumor growth from a tumor patient’s blood or tissue specimen, then activating and expanding these cells to make them stronger and infuse them back into the body to exert a powerful anti-cancer effect. Cancer vaccines Preventive cancer vaccines stimulate your immune system to fight certain cancers, while therapeutic vaccines help your immune cells pick out and destroy specific cancers. Checkpoint inhibitors The immune system has checkpoint measures against certain important points that prevent it from killing healthy cells. Some cancer cells then use these important points to disguise themselves as normal cells and hide from the immune system. And checkpoint inhibitor drugs can help your immune system recognize the cancer and fight it. Clinical trials are currently underway for many different cancers, including metastatic melanoma, lung cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, head and neck cancer, and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, to name a few. Monoclonal antibodies Monoclonal antibodies are designed to recognize and attack cancer cells by attaching to them and then acting like beacons to guide the immune system to better attack. Some monoclonal antibodies can also attach to chemotherapy drugs or radioactive substances that can likewise help stop the growth of cancer cells, and these molecules can treat many different types of cancer. Efforts are being made to combine immunotherapy with other therapies to be able to work better, but there are still significant differences in effectiveness for different patients.