Teaching the body’s immune cells to recognize and fight cancer is one of the holy grails in medicine. Over the past two decades, researchers have developed new immunotherapy drugs that stimulate a patient’s immune cells to significantly shrink or even eliminate tumors. These treatments often focus on increasing the cancer-killing ability of cytotoxic T cells. However, these treatments appear to only work for the small group of patients who already have T cells within their tumors. One 2019 study estimated that under 13% of cancer patients responded to immunotherapy.

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