It uses your immune system to fight cancer. It can help your body attack cancer cells and give your immune system what it needs to help it kill them.

Immunotherapy doesn’t work for all types of cancer. But doctors and researchers are still hard at work to create different kinds of medications and figure out which types of cancers they fight and which people might benefit from them.

Many of these medications are still in the research phase. That means the FDA hasn’t approved them yet. So to get these medications, you have to take part in a clinical trial.

Before doctors can prescribe a drug, it must be tested on volunteers. That helps researchers figure out how well a medication or combination of medications works, and who it’s best for. If the medication works during the clinical trial, the FDA will consider approving it for the disease it was tested on.

Sometimes. Usually, it's used after chemotherapy or radiation. In many cases, this is because those didn’t work. For certain forms of tough-to-treat or advanced cancers, like metastatic squamous cell carcinoma, your doctor may recommend immunotherapy as a first or early treatment.

Immunotherapy can sometimes be paired with traditional treatments. This is called combination therapy. It may include chemotherapy and immunotherapy, or it could involve immunotherapy and other forms of targeted therapy. It might even mix two types of immunotherapy. As part of your overall cancer treatment, your doctor may recommend other steps, like surgery or radiation.