What is immunotherapy?

What is immunotherapy?
Immunotherapy is also sometimes called biologic therapy or biotherapy. It is treatment that uses certain parts of the immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. This can be done in a couple of ways.
Stimulating your own immune system to work harder or smarter to attack cancer cells
Giving you immune system components, such as man-made immune system proteins
The magic treatment for kidney disease-Immunotherapy
Types of immunotherapy
There are many types of cancer treatments that could be thought of as immunotherapy.
Some work by stimulating your body's own immune system to fight the disease. This may be done by boosting the immune system in a very general way, or by training the immune system to attack some part of cancer cells specifically.
Other treatments sometimes considered immunotherapy use immune system components (such as proteins calledantibodies) that are made in the lab. Some of these boost the immune system once they are in the body. Others don’t really affect the immune system much, if at all. Instead, the antibodies themselves target specific parts of cancer cells, stopping them from growing or making them die.
Immunotherapy drugs are now used to treat a number of cancers, including cancers of the bladder, breast, colon, kidney, lung, and prostate, as well as leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and melanoma.
How to Treat Kidney Disease with Immunotherapy?
Immunotherapy has been applied to kidney disease successfully and it shows enormous treatment effect in controlling the disease.Immunotherapy can be divided into six steps and it works in the following steps to treat kidney disease.
Step one: accurate diagnosis
A thorough and accurate diagnosis is the important premise for making an individualized treatment regime.Apart from the routine diagnosis tests,the diagnosis also can tell the damage degree to immune system,types of immune complexes in blood and kidneys, uremic toxins in blood etc.
Step two: immune blocking
When immune complexes deposit in kidneys,it will cause abnormal immune response in kidneys causing damage to kidneys. In this treatment step, immunosuppressants are used to suppress the abnormal immune response in kidney.Thereby,no more damage to kidneys will occur.
Step three: immune adjustment
Immune adjustment aims at recovering the immune system to normal statue.If so,no more immune complexes will form.By improving immunity,the immune system will have better ability to remove infectious agents from body.
Step four: immune clearance
Based on the patients specific illness condition like the types of immune complexes in kidneys,kidney damage degree,immune clearance treatment methods including immunoadsorption, plasma exchange,hemoperfusion,hemofiltration etc are used to help patients eliminate the toxins in the blood effectively. These treatment methods can clear the immune complexes and metabolic waste products from body.
Step five: immune regulation
Immune tolerance is just a transition phase because it is not possible for the body to function well with immune complexes and injured renal cells for too long.Therefore,those harmful substances must be removed from body.However,there is no such a treatment in western medicine.Chinese medicine provides such a treatment solution to attain the above treatment goal.
On one hand,Chinese medicine can promote blood circulation and remove blood stasis.The immune complexes will be eliminated from body.On the other hand,Chinese medicine can reinforce Qi and nourish blood so as to enhance the immunity of the body to eliminate harmful substance from body.
Step six: immune protection

Immune protection aims at protecting the damaged intrinsic renal cells and tissues to enhance renal function.Both western medicine and Chinese medicine are used in this treatment step.