From the first moment my wife discovered she
had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones
whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a
gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble
about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this
blog…
Every month, I’ll be
highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from
different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into
understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2014/03/05/recent-advances-in-targeted-breast-cancer-treatments/
I’d never heard of this and had to take some time to do a
bit more research than usual.
“Immunotherapy is a new class of cancer treatment that works
to harness the innate powers of the immune system to fight cancer.”
Hmmm, OK, I had my class in immunology in college and did
pretty well in it. But this STILL doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So let me
go to my “first base” source and we’ll scaffold up from there to the abstract
that sparked this post.
From Wikipedia: “Cancer immunotherapy is the use of the
immune system to reject cancer. The main premise is stimulating the patient's
immune system to attack the malignant tumor cells that are responsible for the
disease. This can be either through immunization of the patient (a cancer vaccine),
in which case the patient's own immune system is trained to recognize tumor
cells as targets to be destroyed, or through the administration of therapeutic
antibodies as drugs, in which case the patient's immune system is recruited to
destroy tumor cells...
“Cell based immunotherapy is another major entity of cancer
immunotherapy. This involves immune cells...which are either activated in [the
body by using] certain cytokines...or they are isolated, enriched and
transfused to the patient to fight against cancer.
“...the immune system responds to [everything] it encounters
[by identifying the differences] between ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ [things. That is
part of the challenge with cancer:] many kinds of tumor cells...are more or
less tolerated by the patient's own immune system since the tumor cells are
essentially the patient's own cells that are growing, dividing and spreading
without proper regulatory control.
“...many kinds of tumor cells display unusual antigens that
are either inappropriate for the cell type and/or its environment, or are only
normally present [at certain times]. A protein called GD2 is often found on the
surfaces of a wide range of tumor cells [so it is used as a kind of a signal
for] target for immunotherapies. Other kinds of tumor cells display cell
surface receptors that are rare or absent on the surfaces of healthy cells, [one
of which is present on the]cell surface [in] abnormally high levels on the
surface of breast cancer tumor cells.”
In summary: breast cancer cells (as well as other kinds of
cancer cells) are cells that grow out of control inside the Human body. Because
they are from the body, they don’t
set off the reaction of the immune system – which usually charges up as soon as
it comes in contact with something foreign like influenza or cold viruses. It
doesn’t fight the cancer cells on its own – because it thinks they “belong”.
But they aren’t completely normal and using certain kinds of drugs, doctors can
“highlight” the cancer cells so that the body says, “Aha! There you are!” and
goes on to attack the cancer cells on its own.
OK – background. This month, an article I came across
expresses new hope for the use of immunotherapy in treating breast cancer. “Active
immunotherapy in breast cancer and its implementation into clinical trials have
been largely a frustrating experience in the last decades.” The implication
here is that this is changing.
For those of you who are appalled by the standard practice
of introducing toxic chemicals to the body, this line of research and new
interest in stimulation the body itself to fight cancer will come as good news.
The “bad” news is that this information is just the
beginning and looks at answering basic questions:
“What do we know about tumor immunogenicity, and how might
we therapeutically improve tumor immunogenicity?” In other words, what do we
know about how tumors hide and can we make drugs to cut through that “cloak of
invisibility”?
“How can we modulate response of the immune system?” Can we
make it so the body ONLY attacks the cancer cells?
“Is there any gene signature predictive of response to
immune modulators?” Is there any natural part of a tumor cell that would tell
us how well a cancer cell could protect itself from the immune system?
“The success of future immunotherapy strategies will depend
on the identification of additional immunogenic antigens that can serve as the
best tumor-rejection targets.” They need to find MORE SPECIFIC cancer cell
markers than they have now in order to really target them.
“Therapeutic success will depend on developing the best
antigen delivery systems and on the elucidation of the entire network of immune
signaling pathways that regulate immune responses in the tumor
microenvironment.” There’s NOTHING OUT THERE NOW that is effective in spurring
the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. The need to find the markers,
design drugs that will highlight them by figuring out how to “tell the body”
that it needs to fight THESE cells.
So while we wait, we go on with new therapies – confident that
breast cancer will go the way of smallpox: extinction on Earth.
Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunotherapy,
http://www.cancerresearch.org/cancer-immunotherapy/what-is-cancer-immunotherapy,
http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/16/1/204/abstract
Image: http://www.ddw-online.com/img/32/800/600/0/0/current-and-emerging-trends-in-immunogenicity-research.png
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