[HN Gopher] Immune cells fighting cancer get exhausted within ho...
___________________________________________________________________
Immune cells fighting cancer get exhausted within hours of
encountering tumors
Author : gmays
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-08-05 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It makes me wonder if there is an additional cell state or
| ailment that will only present itself after more cancers are
| suppressed more reliably.
|
| Like the cancer state is more than just an error, its a
| protection mechanism.
|
| Since cancer treatments never address the root cause of whats
| turning cells cancerous, only mitigating the presence and affects
| of how many cancerous ones there are.
|
| Right now, the additional state happens in too few survivors for
| anyone to notice. Like maybe the additional state its just as
| rare to further progress, and cancer often results in death.
|
| There doesn't have to be a meaning, I just wonder if there is and
| if it could change the approach to improve protecting the host
| and ensuring survival.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The cause is that DNA mutations makes the cells go "feral", and
| turn into a new mono-cellular species that invades the body.
| DNA can be damaged in several ways, by UV rays or mutagenic
| chemicals, but it can also happen during cell-division. Any
| type of damage, even micro damage, the body sustains means that
| cells have to start dividing to repair it. But cells also
| continuously divide to replace old ones even without damage.
|
| So all in all, it's just a matter of time until you get
| unlucky, something goes wrong and you have a cancer.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yes, but that's not my observation unless it was intended to
| point out why its not worth speculating further.
| byteCoder wrote:
| From my personal experience with advanced melanoma under a trial
| at NIH almost 12 years ago, Dr. Steven Rosenberg and his research
| team:
|
| 1. Surgically resected a tumor and removed the tumor attacking T
| cells in a lab,
|
| 2. expanded them in a lab to 130 billion,
|
| 3. returned them to me after making me immunosuppressed, and
|
| 4. kick started my new immune system with high-dose IL-2.
|
| Within three months, my tumors were essentially gone.
|
| I've been cancer-free since.
|
| It seems to me that the body doesn't have enough of the right T
| cells to fight the mutated, cancerous cells.
| Confiks wrote:
| Was your case publicized? [1] looks quite similar but is a case
| from two years earlier. Similar procedure?
|
| [1]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000649712...
| byteCoder wrote:
| The protocol in linked study appears to be similar to the
| melanoma therapy I underwent at NIH, except for the CAR-T
| part.
|
| The study I was part of was published in a few papers,
| including:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6295669/
| tomohelix wrote:
| That is why CAR-T and personalized medicine are some hot topics
| right now. Essentially, the best medicine and treatment we have
| often just expand or aid our own body capacity to fight back.
| Cancer is especially problematic because our body often refuses
| to fight it.
|
| Training an elite team of cellular terminators is the next step
| when the local forces are just not adequate anymore. But it is
| still so expensive.
| sufiyan wrote:
| Is there some way to induce a cytokine storm of sorts so that
| this weakening is essentially reduced
| dillydogg wrote:
| I'm an immunologist and I honestly can't stand tumor immunology.
| I'm glad there are people studying it of course, but it seems
| impossible to actually perform a reasonable experiment. Tumor
| immunologists are so obsessed with the tumor microenvironment and
| tumor resident immune cells and all of these other cell types
| that are totally messed up in cancer.
|
| We don't even know how these cells work when they are operating
| perfectly! I wish there was more funding for immunology outside
| of the context of cancer, but I find it reasonable that this
| isn't the case.
| dillydogg wrote:
| Oh, to add, I think this is pretty interesting given my
| aversion to tumor immunology. I've seen trends in the field
| about changing the definition of what an exhausted cell is. I
| haven't read the primary research but they allude to using
| sequencing based approaches which are cool/more sophisticated
| compared to previous surface marker ones.
| darkclouds wrote:
| > We don't even know how these cells work when they are
| operating perfectly!
|
| And this makes me think, will lab grown meat essentially be
| eating different types of animal cancers.
|
| I dont think you have the right tools, the upgraded/improved
| tools, like xrays and fMRI all generate new insights and from
| those insights come new theories.
|
| Which means superstitious miracles still happen because science
| cant explain it.
| tomohelix wrote:
| Well both cancer and lab meats are infinitely dividing so in
| some sense they are similar. But from what I know, lab meat
| are made so that they can't support their own growth. They
| need specific media and nutrients and they are designed to
| not spontaneously mutate to leech these nutrients from other
| tissues, e.g. can form blood vessels.
|
| But, like they said, life find a way. BUT, the chances of
| eating lab meat and got cancer is probably lower than say,
| eating fried foods gives you cancer. So not an issue IMO.
| Breathing gives you cancer too
| darkclouds wrote:
| Well the HeLa (Henrietta Lacks) cells are maintained in
| Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium (DMEM) and RPMI 1640 to
| pick a few media, but I've yet to be able to find out the
| media to grow lab meat.
|
| Anyone know? I'm sure its a business confidential media so
| I doubt it will be public knowledge which means I wont know
| if its got enough nutrition compared to traditionally
| organic grown meat or not. But sure its not aggressive at
| leeching nutrients from surrounding tissue like cancer.
| tomohelix wrote:
| Just some rich media. But it is trivial to engineer the
| cells so that they require one or two special chemicals
| to survive. They can make it something exotic but
| harmless so that no way you can find anything close in
| the human body and still no concern about toxicity.
|
| In short, a dead switch to the cells once they are taken
| out of the special media to grow them.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-05 23:02 UTC)