Recent in a patient in Florida has been shared widely on social media and news outlets as some sort of a breakthrough. While , and other cancer vaccines -- -- are in development, it has been a while since such a vaccine has received this much coverage. So let's break it down and see what is going on here...
According to the National Cancer Institute, . This means that diseases are treated using living organisms or “substances derived from living organisms, or laboratory-produced versions of such substances.” In this case, the person with cancer is the living organism, and the person's own immune system is the substance(s) derived from such an organism. Without going too much into detail, there are some things you need to know about cancer and its relationship to the immune system:
- Cells in our body multiply at different rates. Skin cells, for example, multiply quickly. This is why your skin regenerates fairly quickly after a scrape or a burn. Other cells, like those in our bones, take longer to multiply and heal an injury. Each time a cell multiplies, mechanisms in the cells make sure that the genetic information is accurately transcribed from one cell to the new cells being made. An error at that stage may trigger what is called an “oncogene,” which is a gene that makes the cell multiply without any kind of control, creating a cancer.
- Environmental exposures, such as UV light or chemical carcinogens, can also have this effect on cells.
- Chronic irritation from viral infections such as Human Papillomavirus or Hepatitis B can also make cells make errors in how their genes are copied during cell division.
- The therapy used for a cancer depends on the type of cells that make up the cancerous tissue. Not all cancers are the same, so when we say that cancer is a disease, we are really talking about different diseases all having in common the trait that cells have gone out of control in their reproduction.
- The immune system usually detects these abnormally-reproducing cells and takes them out. However, there are circumstances under which the cancerous cells may not be detected by the immune system, such as when the cancerous cells look “normal” to the immune system because the proteins and sugars on their surface (also known as antigens) are normal, or when the cancerous cells are completely surrounded by normal cells.
- There are different ways in which the immune system can take out those cancerous cells. One way is to have immune cells release chemicals that destroy the cells directly, or they release chemicals that call on other cells to mechanically destroy the cells by basically “eating” the cancerous cells. Another way is to create antibodies that attach to the antigens on cancerous cells and mark them for removal by other specialized cells.