I had a conversation today with a gentlemen and he was telling me about an article he read about a certain new cancer treatment.
The treatment went as follows:
1.) Cancer cells are taken from patient.
2.) Cells are incubated
3.) Cancer cells are then re-injected into a different area of the body
According to him, by re-injecting the cells, the body would view them as an invader and create the antibodies to combat them.
Crazy or not?
Not necessarily crazy but I bet there are a few more steps involved. I’d bet if this were to be a viable treatment the cancer cells would need to be altered to make them more easily recognizable to the immune system. One of the ways that many cancers grow uninhibited is by hiding from the immune system in the first place.
I’ve read of experimental treatments where immune system cells are removed, genetically engineered, made to multiply, then re-injected. Could he be misunderstanding that?
It would make sense for brain cancer wouldn’t it.
Immune system isn’t aware of brain cancer due to the blood brain barrier thing.
evidence: there is no grade 1 brain cancer, its all hard to kill and chemo buys time only. Why ? because the immune system isn’t helping.
Make immune system aware by putting cancer cells onto the other side of the blood brain barrier. Now the immune system makes antibodies,which then get across the blood brain barrier ??
The idea has even been extended to vaccination… which could be effective as a preventative.
If a cell line ( parent cell and children ) needs to have 10 changes in its genes to be cancerous, but its attacked by the immune system with only 5 changes… then it is killed before it becomes cancer ? better ! They tried it with skin cancer, no vaccine yet.
There are some vaccination based treatments for melanoma.
These treatments can now also be enhanced with immune system modulation drugs, like nivumolab, which amplify or extend the immune response and activity on the cancer.
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While something like this might be possible in some cases, the biggest difficulty with treating cancer via antibodies (indeed, with most cancer treatments) is that since cancer cells originate from your own body, they’ll have all (or almost all) the same proteins on their surface that antibodies would recognize. In fact, they look almost just like healthy cells in all ways, so it’s tough to find something that kills them but not healthy cells. Just taking them out and putting them back in won’t change that.
And I highly doubt that the treatment protocol is exactly as you describe, since it’s basically causing the cancer to metastasize, which is something that you really want to avoid doing if at all possible.
Not totally crazy, but many problems. I recall such a treatment being tried around 1965 on a U. Ill. football player. No success. But it is an old idea. Look up Coley’s toxins, which go back to the 19th century: Coley's toxins - Wikipedia.
This is correct, but perhaps a little misleading. The immune system does recognize many kinds of abnormalities that may arise in your own cells (potentially cancerous cells, if you like) and destroys them. So the immune system is naturally critically important in fighting cancer. However, by definition successful cancers are found among the subset of abnormal cells that eventually evolve within your body to evade the immune system.
The immune system is highly sophisticated and there’s always a fine balance between effective targeting of genuinely pathogenic or abnormal cells and dysfunctional auto-immune responses (i.e. optimizing false negatives vs false positives). One active area of research is to inhibit some of the checkpoints in the immune response when a patient has cancer - i.e. to make the immune system more aggressive in seeking out abnormal cells. In other words, to try to reduce the false negative rate, while accepting the tradeoff of potential false positives (autoimmune response).
ETA: I’m not up to date on this stuff, but see here, NY times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/health/harnessing-the-immune-system-to-fight-cancer.html
This may not be true. The immune response is complex and context-dependent. I’m not up to date the literature, but it’s not implausible that it might be possible to extract and re-inject killed cancer cells that present their specific antigens in a context that’s more likely to trigger an adaptive immune response, which would in turn then target the original living cancer cells. But all the antibody therapies that I’m aware of (which have been around for a while) involve monoclonal antibodies that are injected directly (i.e. not triggering your own immune system to produce them) that are design to attack specific targets found on particular types of cancer cells.
Here’s a summary discussing the use of monoclonal antibodies in the treatment of cancer.
If Googling for information on this stuff, be cautious about your hits. It’s a vital area of genuine cancer research, but the vague notion of “boosting your immune system” (by drinking kale juice or whatever) is, of course, a frequent bullshit claim for “health foods”, and this extends into alt-med woo and quack cancer “cures”.
What the OP describes would fall under the broad term “cancer vaccine”. The term encompasses conventional preventative vaccines against viruses that may later cause cancer. But there are also vaccine therapies to treat existing cancers, designed to trigger an immediate anti-tumor response in the patient’s own adaptive immune system. There’s a Wiki listing many of the avenues of research. None is quite so simple as just re-injecting your own cancer cells, but there are certainly lines of research to tailor the response to the characteristics of a particular tumor.
It may be about this specialized (and very expensive) treatment for advanced prostate cancer.
Various types of interferon have been used for certain types of cancer, most commonly melanoma and lymphoma, for decades.
Oh, certainly, there’s a difference between “very difficult” and “impossible”. The immune system does play a role in fighting cancer, and it and various other therapies can distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells in various ways. Just, not as well as we’d like.
I wonder if this person was trying to describe a stem cell transplant. The general process is…
Stimulate stem cell production with neupogen or similar
Extract stem cells in a process similar to kidney dialysis
Kill the cancer with otherwise deadly doses of chemo and/or radiation - at this point, the patient has no functioning immune system
Replace the stem cells harvested earlier to reboot the immune system
There’s also been a lot of work with monoclonal antibodies, aka MABs. The general scheme with these is they find cancer cells with specific proteins “expressed” and hook on. The combination of the cancer cell with a MAB molecule is designed to be especially appetizing to the immune system.