A role for biological therapy has been established for melanoma, kidney cancer and some cancers of the blood such as chronic myelogenous leukemia and hairy cell leukemia. There is also some evidence of its effectiveness in treating breast, ovarian and colon cancer, as well as Kaposi's sarcoma .
The United States Food and Drug Administration has officially approved giving interferon-alpha for hairy cell leukemia, giving IL-2 for kidney cancer and Kaposi's sarcoma and giving the colony-stimulating factors for minimizing the period of low white blood cell counts caused by chemotherapy . In practice, physicians use these approved agents for other conditions as well.
Yet biological therapy is still in the early phases of development. These therapies should be used when there is no effective standard treatment, generally in clinical trials performed at qualified cancer centers, or when known treatments have failed to work or have stopped working. In diseases for which no useful chemotherapy programs exist, such as melanoma and kidney cancer, biological therapy is often given as a first-line treatment.
Caution and Hope Many promoters of unproven and useless anticancer treatments claim that their product or therapy improves the immune system and so will probably cure cancer. As an educated consumer of health care services, you should beware of any such false claims about new agents that augment the immune system. Except for some rare tumors such as Kaposi's sarcoma and some lymphomas that often result from immune suppression, there is as yet no definite proof that cancer is caused by failure of the immune system.
