Fighting cancer from within:Using the body's immune system to tackle cancer

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the body's own immune system to fight cancer.

Immunotherapy drugs aim to wake up the patients’ immune system to destroy cancer cells and are now given regularly to patients with lung cancer, aggressive skin cancers called melanoma and patients with other cancer types too. These drugs work well in many patients keeping cancer at bay, sometimes, for many years. Unfortunately however, a large proportion of patients treated with these drugs experience serious side effects. These side effects can be hard to manage, affect patients' quality of life and in some, rare cases, can be fatal. At the moment, it is difficult to predict who will experience side effects.

In this talk, Claire will uncover how immunotherapy drugs work, explore the common and rare side effects and share how research led by the University of Birmingham is exploring ways to understand and reduce these severe side effects to improve treatments for future cancer patients.

No science background needed! So come along, tune in, and discover how our research is exploring ways to improve treatments for future cancer patients.

Our expert

Dr Claire Palles is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham's Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences. Find out more about her work.