Therapies that stimulate the patient's immune system to fight cancer can become even more effective if diversified by gender, exploiting the male and female differences in the functioning of their immune systems to develop different drug combinations "for him" and " for her". Lucia Gabriele of the Department of Oncology and Molecular Medicine at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita 'in Rome explains this to ANSA, which, in collaboration with the Center of Reference for Gender Medicine, is conducting several studies precisely on the gender differences of functioning of the immune system, one of which has just been published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology. The ISS team, in collaboration with Paolo Marchetti of the S. Andrea Hospital (Rome) and with Paolo Ascierto of the National Cancer Institute of Naples (Pascale Foundation) underline that there is an important male-female difference in some aspects of immune response to cancer and that this difference can affect patients' response to immunotherapy, which is one of the new frontiers in the fight against cancer and which has considerably changed survival to tumors such as melanoma and lung cancer in recent years. More generally, the expert points out, “we know that there are differences in the functioning of the male and female body defenses. It is no coincidence that women are more prone to autoimmune diseases, precisely because their immune system is in some ways more active.
