Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 01 2020, @08:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the sound-of-tumours-sneezing dept.

Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it:

A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they've infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.

But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.

Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.

This is one of those ideas that seems nuts, but had so many earlier results pointing towards it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn't also targeted.

From this perspective, the immune system's inability to eliminate tumor cells isn't only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It's also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells. A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a "cold" immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a "hot" one that is able to attack a tumor.

But not everyone has a response to these drugs, raising the question of whether there are other ways to activate the immune system at the site of a tumor. One potential option is simply the things that normally rev up the immune system: infectious agents. The immune response to cancer-targeting viruses mentioned above would provide an indication that this does occur. Others have targeted a variety of pathogens to the sites of tumors and found that this increases the immune response to the tumor as well.

To check whether something similar might happen be happening[sic] in humans, the researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer, and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn't get the flu.

PNAS, 2019. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904022116 (About DOIs).


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @04:20PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @04:20PM (#938251)

    OMG vaccines cause CANCER! I need to order more probiotic prayer beads.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @04:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @04:46PM (#938270)

    the ones that glow in the dark and stay warm for 30+ years are the best!

  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:28AM

    by Sulla (5173) on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:28AM (#938464) Journal

    Just drink Radon Water, cures all ailments and makes you stronger

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam