# Cancer: Does Anybody Study "Spontaneous" Remissions?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancer-does-anybody-study-spontaneous-remissions/630886>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [August 8, 2012, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancer-does-anybody-study-spontaneous-remissions/630886 "2012-08-08T18:28:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2012, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancer-does-anybody-study-spontaneous-remissions/630886/1 "2012-08-08T18:28:21Z")

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I wonder if anything has been learned about cancer and the body’s response to it. Some people have terminal cancer, they prepare for death…and then, the body marshals some final defense…and the cancer shrinks and disappears.  
I know it is a very rare event, but has anyone studied such people? Some would attribute such remissions to divine intervention (Miracle), but there must be something about such cases that wold point the way to a better understanding of how to fight cancer.

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**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2012, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancer-does-anybody-study-spontaneous-remissions/630886/2 "2012-08-08T18:39:07Z")

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Of course they do. [People have been studying spontaneous remission for more than a century.](http://bioinfo.mni.th-mh.de/cancer/hobohm-2001-cii.pdf) We know a little more about it than we used to, but it hasn’t pointed directly to a cancer cure.

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**Author:** ![lavenderviolet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/cdc98d/32.png) [@lavenderviolet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lavenderviolet)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2012, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cancer-does-anybody-study-spontaneous-remissions/630886/3 "2012-08-08T23:03:14Z")

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When I’ve read about these cases, they are generally attributed to some people having the good fortune of having a robust immune system response that destroys the cancer.

There is a lot of research being done nowadays on how cancer cells manage to slip past the immune system and how we can harness the immune system to fight cancer. Vaccines against certain types of cancer (particularly melanoma) are under development right now, and several cancer treatments that are already in use employ monoclonal antibodies to try to help the immune system fight the cancer: [Monoclonal antibody - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibodies#Cancer_treatment)