3 ms·
From what I remember, these blood cancer have an antigen, CD13 or something, which is unique to them - no other body part has it, making it easy to target them.
by pacap 11y ago
From what I remember, these blood cancer have an antigen, CD13 or something, which is unique to them - no other body part has it, making it easy to target them.
Otherwise, you get the side effect of destroying your own body, the case of a woman a few years ago, who died having her lungs destroyed by immunotherapy. Lungs had the same antigen.
This morning I read something hopeful in this direction - UCSF researchers designed an AND gate, so now they could trigger a T cell attack only when 2 specific antigens are present, making it much more reliable. And I could imagine these can be chained, further narrowing it down. It needs genetic sequencing to isolate.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401471/tricked-out-immune-cells-could-attack-cancer-spare-healthy-cells https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401471/tricked-out-immune-...
At the moment this is a terrible manual and time consuming process, so it is expensive.
- erkkie 11y agoThis is also why a combination of engineered T-cells and immune checkpoint inhibitors is a really winning combo. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/01/paradigm-shift-hailed-in-treatment-of-lung-cancer http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/01/paradigm-shif...
- AstralStorm 11y agoImmune checkpoint (fancy name that, you probably mean anti-autoimmune system) inhibitors main problem is the very high risk of autoimmune disorders that are hard or impossible to treat. Just toggling the suppressor will not kill clonal cells already in circulation, and those can last a long, long time, or even a lifetime. If you're unlucky, you will also get "broken" immune memory cells - which also last for life. Trading cancer for SLE or rheumatoidal arthritis etc.