Immunotherapy for childhood cancer

At Advocate Children’s Hospital, we work hard to find the right treatment for your child’s specific needs. Sometimes that means recommending new approaches, including those still in clinical trials.

Immunotherapy for pediatric cancer represents one of these promising options, working to assist your child’s immune system or give it a boost. Some immunotherapy drugs already have approvals for certain cancers, while others have shown promising results in early use. Our team helps you decide if immunotherapy is right for your child.

Learn more about our cancer clinical trials, including immunotherapy clinical trials.

Childhood cancers treated with immunotherapy

Doctors hope immunotherapy eventually works for a wide range of cancer types, and that they might also use it earlier in treatment. For now, we typically recommend immunotherapy for cancer that resists treatment, returns after initial success, spreads or can’t come out with surgery. Early approved immunotherapies treat:

• Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL)
• Classical form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma
• Later stages of melanoma

Types of immunotherapy for pediatric cancer

Immunotherapy is a biologic therapy, meaning it uses substances found in the body or copies of those substances made in labs. Researchers design some types for specific cancers, while others target features found on a wider range of tumors across the body. Treatment comes as a pill, an intravenous (IV) infection or a shot taken at home.

Some categories of pediatric immunotherapy include:

• CAR T-cell therapy: T-cells are a type of white blood cell that helps the body fight infections. For this therapy, doctors remove T-cells and “reprogram” them to recognize and destroy cancer cells as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. They create millions of these cells and then return them to your child’s body. Approved CAR-T therapy treats the most common form of pediatric leukemia.
• Cancer vaccines: These drugs work like vaccines used for other diseases, by introducing a specific marker on cells and prompting an immune reaction. The immune system is then prepared to look for that feature on cancerous cells. Researchers are working on vaccines that can treat cancer or even prevent it.
• Monoclonal antibodies: These drugs replicate proteins in the body that look for foreign substances. They can attach to cancerous cells and mark them for removal or prevent cancerous cells from evading the immune system. Approved drugs for melanoma and Hodgkin’s lymphoma take the later approach.
• Oncolytic virus therapy: Doctors inject a specially created virus into a tumor. It multiplies inside the tumor’s cancerous cells, destroying them. The immune system sees any remaining cancer cells in the body and goes after them.
• Other immunotherapies: You might hear about other immunotherapies called interferons or interleukins. They help the immune systems slow or destroy cancerous cells, as well as make cells that fight cancer.

Immunotherapy side effects

Although effective, existing cancer therapies sometimes leave lasting effects on the children they help. While our special survivorship program helps watch for these late effects, our doctors and others continue to look for alternatives.

Immunotherapy might help avoid long-term changes, since it’s based on substances already in the body. It’s also intended to only affect cancer cells, rather than all fast-growing cells.

Still, immunotherapy may come with short-term side effects, ones your child’s care team carefully watches for and works to relieve. These side effects may include:

• Allergy-like reactions and rashes
• Weight gain
• Fatigue
• Flu-like symptoms
• Infections
• Thinning hair