Skip to 0 minutes and 14 secondsSPEAKER 1: Welcome to week 3 of cancer immunotherapy, a step change in cancer treatments. Hopefully you have learned a lot so far in the course. If you remember, we have talked about the importance of our immune system, the functions of our different immune cells, and how vaccination can arm our immune system ready to fight disease. In week two, we introduced you to cancer and considered why recognising and destroying cancer cells is such a challenge for our immune system. However, as we saw from the recent news stories, there is hope that novel immune therapies may ultimately help the immune system overcome these challenges.

Skip to 0 minutes and 47 secondsNow in week three, we're going to delve into this a bit further and discuss the different types of cancer immunotherapies is that scientists are developing. What are they? How do they work? And what effects are they having in the clinic? Immunotherapy is an umbrella term that is applied to several different types of treatments, but each has the common aim to use the immune system to kill cancer cells. This might either involve rear whitening natural anti-tumor t-cells while boosting their numbers in the body or giving patients t-cells that have been reprogrammed to recognise cancer. These multiple strategies are necessary because there are so many different types of cancer, more than 200.

Skip to 1 minute and 25 secondsEach of these pose different problems to the immune system and therefore may ultimately require a different type of treatment. This week, you will learn about some different types of immunotherapy. You will hear from several scientists from the Birmingham Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Centre who are developing new immune treatments, clinicians from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital who are seeing their effects, and patients who have benefited from them. At the end we're going to finish with a short quiz, really just to allow you to demonstrate to yourself what you've learned during the three weeks of our course. Also, there will be an opportunity for you to give us some feedback about what you thought about the course.

Skip to 2 minutes and 1 secondWe really hope you enjoy this final week and once again, please keep in touch.

Introduction to the week

In this video Dr Heather Long welcomes you to the third week of the course. This week we will focus on how the immune system can be used to fight cancer, and describe several different novel immunotherapies.

Please continue to keep in touch by commenting in the various discussions throughout the week, we would love to hear from you.

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This video is from the free online course:

Cancer Immunotherapy: a Step Change in Cancer Treatment

University of Birmingham