Immunotherapy for chronic infections

Chronic infections are often resistant to standard treatment. Antibiotics or antivirals help for a while, and then the inflammation returns. The reason is often weakened local immunity that cannot cope with the focus. Cellular immunotherapy strengthens defense exactly where it is needed.

We deliver activated immunocompetent cells with high microbicidal activity into the focus, or strengthen antiviral immunity. The method acts where usual therapy works weakly and helps break the cycle of constant flare-ups.

The approach is used in chronic cystitis, sinusitis, wound bacterial infections, and in herpes virus and human papillomavirus infection. It is especially relevant when an infection is resistant to antibiotics or recurs often.

The physician decides whether treatment is possible and how it is structured after assessing the course of the disease, examination data, and treatment history. The method combines with standard therapy and is gently tolerated.

To see why the method fits here, it helps to know how a chronic infection is built. It is not simply an acute infection left untreated: bacteria in a chronic focus live differently. They form a biofilm — a protective matrix inside which the antibiotic concentration is tens of times below the effective level, and the cells' metabolism is slowed so far that drugs acting on dividing bacteria barely reach them. A culture may show sensitivity to the antibiotic while treatment still fails.

That explains why yet another course of antibiotics brings only temporary improvement and the inflammation returns once it is stopped. A biofilm is dismantled not by a drug but by cells: neutrophils and macrophages that reach the focus itself. The problem is that in chronic inflammation local immunity is exhausted and does not do that work. Adaptive cell immunotherapy delivers activated cells with high microbicidal activity into the focus — it adds what is missing there.

With viral infections the task is different. Herpes viruses and human papillomavirus are not cleared from the body completely: herpes persists for life in nerve ganglia, HPV in the basal layer of the epithelium. So the aim of treatment is not to expel the virus but to restore control over it: fewer and milder recurrences, lower viral activity. Promising complete elimination in these diagnoses would be incorrect, and we do not.

Before a course the picture of the focus has to be precise: what keeps it going. In chronic cystitis it matters whether there is an anatomical cause — a stone, a stricture, prolapse; in sinusitis, the state of the sinus ostium and the presence of polyps; in wound infections, whether there is a foreign body, necrosis or impaired blood supply. If the focus is sustained by a mechanical cause, that is dealt with first, otherwise any treatment repeats in a circle.