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Immunotherapy or biological therapy is the treatment of disease by activating or suppressing the immune system.Immunotherapies designed to elicit or amplify an immune response are classified as activation immunotherapies, while immunotherapies that reduce or suppress are classified as suppression immunotherapies.
Active immunotherapy is a type of immunotherapy that aims to stimulate the host's immune system or a specific immune response to a disease or pathogen and is most commonly used in cancer treatments. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Active immunotherapy is also used for treatment of neurodegenerative disorders , such as Alzheimer's disease , Parkinson's disease ...
However, strictly speaking, immunogenicity refers to the ability of an antigen to induce an adaptive immune response. Thus an antigen might bind specifically to a T or B cell receptor, but not induce an adaptive immune response. If the antigen does induce a response, it is an 'immunogenic antigen', which is referred to as an immunogen.
Biological response modifiers (BRMs) are substances that modify immune responses. They can be endogenous (produced naturally within the body) or exogenous (as pharmaceutical drugs ), and they can either enhance an immune response or suppress it .
Immunochemistry is also used to describe the application of immune system components, in particular antibodies, to chemically labelled antigen molecules for visualization. Various methods in immunochemistry have been developed and refined, and used in scientific study, from virology to molecular evolution .
An immune response is a physiological reaction which occurs within an organism in the context of inflammation for the purpose of defending against exogenous factors. These include a wide variety of different toxins, viruses, intra- and extracellular bacteria, protozoa, helminths, and fungi which could cause serious problems to the health of the host organism if not cleared from the body.
Therefore, immune cells can recognize the surface antigens on the tumor cells to elicit immune responses. Examples of drugs that exploit such a mechanism include pembrolizumab and telimomab . Apart from directing the inhibitory pathways, agonistic antibodies can target immunostimulatory receptors to elicit immune responses.
There are two main categories of immunostimulants: [1] Specific immunostimulants provide antigenic specificity in immune response, such as vaccines or any antigen.; Non-specific immunostimulants act irrespective of antigenic specificity to augment immune response of other antigen or stimulate components of the immune system without antigenic specificity, such as adjuvants and non-specific ...