Chemotherapy vs Immunotherapy

What is the difference between chemotherapy and immunotherapy? Basically chemotherapy is a medication that goes and attacks and kills all cells that are replicating, that are duplicating, that are growing quickly. So it will kill cancer cells that are growing quickly of course. But it will also kill other normal cells in our body that are also growing, such as cells in our mouth, that's why you get ulcers, cells in our digestive system, that's why you can get diarrhea, cells in our bone marrow, that's why our platelets go down, that's why we become anemic with chemotherapy. So chemotherapy is not very specific. It goes in and it neutralizes and kills any cell, whether good or bad, that's growing, replicating. However now, we have multiple other ways of killing cancer cells. You may know we all have a few microscopic cancer cells running around our bloodstream, but these cancer cells don't cause any problem because our own immune system keeps them in check. And the way it does that is that the immune system with its policeman called the T cell checks the ID on every cell. And if it shows that the cell is a cancer cell, it will attack it and our own immune system will kill that cancer cell, not allowing it to replicate or to grow in an uncontrolled fashion. However, sometimes cancer cells can develop a fake ID and it shows that fake ID to the policeman, that fake ID to the T cell from the immune system and then it evades the immune system. The immune system thinks it's a normal good cell in our body, and that cancer cell then starts growing quickly. So we have found a new type of medication called an immune checkpoint inhibitor, where when that cancer cell gets to the checkpoint with a policeman, the T cell from the immune system, and instead of down regulating it or showing that fake ID, we give it that medication, it's no longer able to show the fake ID, the immune system recognizes it as a bad cell, and the immune system comes and kills those cancer cells. So that is the basis of an immune checkpoint inhibitor, which is an FDA approved type of immunotherapy that we give not just in mesothelioma, in lung cancer, in esophagus cancer, in kidney cancers, in skin cancers, in multiple types of cancers. Immunotherapy.