Every day, countless unknown scientists and doctors struggle and study for the healthy life of mankind, when "incurable disease" becomes "invincible", when "minimal chance of cure" becomes "greatly improved". The human race against cancer has never stopped.
Just now, the Melbourne Cancer Center has new research results for the fight against cancer, a new immunotherapy!
1, immunotherapy
Nowadays, people have a certain degree of knowledge about the traditional treatment of cancer, such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and so on.
In recent years, scientists have turned to immunotherapy, simply using the body`s own immune system to fight cancer. There are usually two types of cancer immunotherapy:
a. Stimulate or strengthen the efficacy of the autoimmune system to fight cancer.
b. Add new ingredients to the immune system, such as the proteins of the artificial immune system, such as the use of antibodies and vaccines.
Some immunotherapy is also known as biotherapy (Biologic Therapy or Biotherapy). Over the past few decades, immunotherapy has become an important part of treating certain types of cancer.
Some of the more novel technologies are being developed, and they may offer new hope for future cancer treatment.
2. New immunotherapy
Immune cells usually kill cancer cells like snipers. They inject the toxin directly into this foreign bad cell and terminate its life.
In the past, only 30% of patients with immunotherapy used to kill cancer cells were effective, and the human body developed resistance to the drug, but not very well.
But just now, Melbourne researchers have found that the body`s immune system will kill tumor cells in a new way. They say the mechanism provides them with a new way to treat tumors and can improve their efficacy.
3, tumor necrosis factor (Tumor Necrosis Factor)
The human immune system mentioned above can be a human guard and a scavenger, and T-cells do a great job.
T cells are the main weapon of the immune system. They can detect virus-infected cells in the body and initiate countermeasures to effectively kill the virus.
Many scientists genetically engineered T cells to recognize and attack cancer cells to fight cancer.
Doctors are still working on how to transform T-cells and learn how to use them in the best possible way. There are also many treatments for other types of cancer under study.
Researchers at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Melbourne have found another way to kill cancer cells.
In Australia, they used a new genome-wide screening technique, CRISPR, to screen all 20000 genes in cancer cells alone.
They tested which genes were missing to allow cancer cells to infiltrate the immune system`s radar.
Jane Oliaro, co-editor-in-chief, said the genetic screening process helped them find that large amounts of energetic substances were released in the process of killing cancer cells with immune cells.
One of them, called tumor necrosis factor (Tumor Necrosis Factor), causes extensive collateral damage to other nearby cancer cells.
"We tested it in a lot of different tumor cells and different immune cells, and surprisingly, this effect played a leading role in the whole experiment," Dr. Oliaro said.
"We believe that this has a very important effect on the improvement of the efficiency of the immunotherapy, since this approach may have the same guiding effect on the killing of cancer cells, and the effect may be much more than that of people."
Dr. Oliaro said a new anti-cancer drug called Smac mimetics is in the early stages of human clinical trials, making T cells more sensitive to tumor cells and thus increasing the killing rate.
She said the combination of Smac mimetics and immunotherapy drugs could increase the immune system`s broader killing power and improve the effectiveness of these new therapies.
