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bitstream [soylentnews.org] writes:

Vice: Scientists Find Cancer's 'Achilles Heel' — Which the Body Could Be Trained to Attack [vice.com]

A discovery in the genetic make-up of tumors means scientists now believe that they have found a way to get the human immune system to recognize cancer as an hostile and attack it.

When cancer tumors grow, they evolve and mutate into very different groups of cells that often look and behave differently, which makes them hard to attack. But this study have found that even after that evolution process, all cells within the tumor contain markers of their original state which can act as a flag. The cancer cell surface carries this flag which can be recognized by specialized cells in the immune system.

There's two ways to exploit this property:
  * Develop a vaccine made up of the cancer flags, that would train the immune system to spot and attack them.
  * Harvesting T-cells that react most strongly to the cancer cells from the body, growing them in a lab and inject the multiplied load back into the patient.

Swanton, one of the researchers says that "I will be disappointed if we haven't treated a patient within two years. Do we think it's going to work? I hope this is going to result in improvements in survival outcomes. If this doesn't work I'll probably hang my hat up and do something else,".

These new findings, will make it possible to tell the immune system how to specifically recognize and attack tumors.

The article will be published in the journal Science [sciencemag.org].

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