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A shot that helps the body fight cancer as hard as it attacks the flu could be a step closer following a scientific breakthrough.
It has long been a frustration for doctors that the body is good at fighting viruses like the flu, but bad at fighting cancer.
Now, by studying mice with melanoma skin cancer, scientists have discovered that the tumors trick not only the immune cells around them into recognizing how dangerous they are, but also the lymph nodes, an important part of the immune system.
They injected the mice with artificial genetic code, like that seen in the flu virus, which made the cancer appear dangerous and the lymph nodes reacted more strongly.
Dr Ed Roberts, who led the study from Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and the University of Glasgow, said: “These lymph nodes play an important role in fighting cancer, but at the moment they respond to it as if it were a small cut on the finger.’
An injection that helps the body fight cancer as strongly as it attacks the flu could be one step closer after a scientific breakthrough
It has long been a frustration for doctors that the body is good at fighting viruses like the flu but bad at fighting cancer.
He added: “However, by making cancer more like the flu, we could make the lymph nodes respond much more aggressively.”
The cells that alert the immune system to dangers are called dendritic cells.
They ‘eat’ a bit of a tumor to show it to the immune cells that should fight it, called T cells.
But dendritic cells convey the misleading message that the tumors are relatively harmless.
Researchers realized that dendritic cells were carrying messages about tumors to the lymph nodes after they stained tumor proteins bright green and saw pieces of them appear in the nodes.
The study, published in the journal Science Immunology, raises hopes that a similar injection could help human cancer patients fight the disease, although more research is needed.
Cancer Research UK research director Dr Catherine Elliott said: “This exciting research could help us find ways to help our own bodies fight cancer more vigorously.”