Opinion: We need more answers about immunotherapy for the elderly
People older than 65 make up more than half of cancer patients. We need to learn how well immunotherapy works for them.
An old idea — using the body’s immune system to fight cancer cells, first proposed more than a century ago — has become one of the most promising approaches to treating cancer today. Immunotherapy is effective against a variety of cancers, with sometimes spectacular results. But I worry about how effective it is in people over age 65, who make up half of cancer patients.
We know that immunotherapy is by older individuals. But how well they. It causes the immune system to change and become less effective over time. Since immunotherapy involves harnessing the immune system to fight cancer, there are questions about how well it works in patients whose immune systems are changing.
