Groundbreaking vaccine development in cancer treatment
Scientists announced that they are working on an injection that will help the body fight cancer as strongly as it fights the flu.
The fact that the body is good at fighting viruses such as flu but is bad at fighting cancer remains a problem that doctors have been working on and trying to solve for a long time.
Now researchers from the UK Cancer Research Institute of Scotland and the University of Glasgow have made progress on this path with their studies on mice with melanoma skin cancer.
Scientists have discovered that tumors “fool” not only the immune cells surrounding them, but also the lymph nodes, an important part of the immune system, into not realizing how dangerous they are.
Researchers injected mice with artificial genetic code similar to that seen in the flu virus that makes cancer seem dangerous, and their lymph nodes responded more strongly.
Dr. who directed the research. “These lymph nodes play an important role in fighting cancer, but right now they’re responding to it as if it were a small cut on the finger,” Ed Roberts said.
“But by making the cancer look more like the flu, we can make the lymph nodes respond much more aggressively.”
IT CODES TUMORS AS HARMFUL
The cells that warn the immune system against dangers are called dendritic cells. They destroy part of the tumor and show it to the immune cells called T cells that are supposed to fight it.
But dendritic cells carry a misleading message that tumors are relatively harmless.
After staining the proteins in the tumors bright green and seeing pieces of them appear in the nodes, the researchers realized that dendritic cells carry messages about the tumors to the lymph nodes.
MORE RESEARCH IS NEEDED
The study, published in the journal Science Immunology, raises hopes that a similar vaccine could help human cancer patients fight the disease, but more research is needed.
England Cancer Research Research Director Dr. “This exciting research could help us find ways to help our own bodies fight cancer more strongly,” said Catherine Elliott. said.
