Immunopharmacological Interventions in Select Disease Conditions

Purpose: Medical practitioners have grappled with the challenge encountered with management of several diseases especially diseases that cannot be cured but can only be managed. In the course of therapy, some patients stop getting positive results from previously efficacious drug while adverse effects of some drugs become unbearable in time. This study aims at bringing together immunotherapeutic approaches that could be researched upon, and presented for clinical trials for the betterment of patients’ lives. Materials and Methods: SALSA, a simple and rational framework (Search, Appraisal, Synthesis and Analysis) was adopted in the study. Only studies on immunology and immunotherapy were included. By applying the framework of SALSA, the first step was to search or to identify relevant and related studied. For this purpose, different search engines that include Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus were used. Different key words such as immunology, immunotherapy, immune response, hypertension, diabetes, tumour, etc. were used in the search for relevant studies. After downloading the studies, a manual appraisal was done to remove irrelevant and duplicated ones. In the end, 105 studies that align with our research objectives was selected and reviewed. Findings: Hypertension was ranked the third factor for disability-adjusted life years by World Health Organisation. For over 40 years, the role of immune system in the genesis of HTN has been firmly established by investigations from around the world. Researchers have pinned inflammation as central to the pathology of Type 1 disease. Type 2 diabetes has more recently been linked to inflammation too. Natural Killer cells along with some others have the ability to kill tumour cells. Since the immune system has been implicated in the pathogenesis of these diseases, any therapy that would target the immune system may ameliorate and prevent disease progression and the usual complications that ensue later. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Further investigations utilising well-designed and statistically powered clinical studies should be done to ascertain necessary information, especially safety profile on the reviewed immunomodulators.