The human immune system is a remarkable biological system. It heals and protects the body in so many ways that it’s very easy to overlook how extraordinarily well it functions in our everyday lives. However, it is not a perfect system and certain classes of disease do exist that can exploit its weaker points. Cancer is one such example.

While the immune system can fight off and heal many bacterial or viral infections, its inability to protect the body from the many forms of cancer has generated much research and debate. While most of the previous research on the use of immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer has yielded mixed results at best, researchers from Australia have recently released a study that shows the highly effective results of an immunotherapy experiment they performed on mice mesothelioma cells.

Introduction to the Study

The immune system is an exceptionally complex system of interacting cells and cell types, with each cell type serving an explicit function within the overall immuno-framework. When a foreign organism is introduced into the system, these various cells activate to fulfill their proscribed function. Killer T-cells are responsible for binding to antigens and removing them from the system. These T-cells are highly effective at attacking many structures, but their effectiveness against cancer has always been limited. Research into the reason why tumor cells are not attacked in the same way as foreign antigens has revealed that tumors possess a number of means of evading detection from T-cells or do not present as antigens in a manner that makes them readily bindable by T-cells.

For their study, the researchers experimented with a novel technique by injecting what are called toll-like receptor (TLR) agonists into mesothelioma cells in mice. The injection stimulated the immune system to respond to what it thought was a viral infection. The killer T-cells then attacked the tumor antigens that were the locus of the TLR injection.

Conclusion

The results were very impressive. Fully 40% of the mice saw the disappearance of all malignant tissue, while the other 60% saw some form of slowing tumor progression. While noting that anything resembling the development of human treatments was years away, the researchers are hopeful that their experiment will be studied further, both for the treatment of mesothelioma, as well as for other cancers.

Labels: mesothelioma