• Question: did people think about making cells which kill the cancer cells ???

    Asked by cupcake94 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 7 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Good question..

      This is an area of research that is being looked at already. Some scientists are trying to take cells from a cancer patients immune system, re-programme them in the lab to be able to attack and destroy their cancer cells, and then injecting them back into the patient to kill off their cancer. This is an exciting area of research and it will be interesting to see where this type of treatment goes in the future.

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Very insightful question. The body has a very good way of making sure that cells don’t keep on dividing and become cancerous.

      But one of the ways cancers can grow is by evading the body’s own mechanism for stopping dividing cells. By doing this it is hard to make the body recognise the cancer cells specifically, there would be a lot of other cellular damage which could be worse. Most chemotherapies are targetted and so are less damaging to normal, non-cancerous cells.

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      The problem with cancer cells is that they are sneaky, and dont have any defining features for your own body to recognise and attack them! So most chemotherapy treatments are generic and attack all cells in the body that are dividing in the hope that any cancer cells in the body will be destroyed. Thats why research is important to develop better treatments more specific to types of cancer.

    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      As the others have said some labs are looking at taking a patients own immune cells and helping them target the cancer cells. The big problem at the moment is that cancer cells can mutate and evolve to make themselves look different so the immune cells won’t recognize them.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      This is a brilliant question and this kind of treatment is already being used in patients who have cancers that are partly caused by a viral infection. I will try to explain exactly how this works, but this it is a bit complicated so I hope I can make it make sense…

      Like the others said, to use cells to find cancer you have to find a target in the cancer that is not in the healthy cells. Normally white blood cells are very good at finding virus infected cells and killing them, but in cancer this can go wrong. If someone has a virus in their cancer cells doctors can take some of the person’s white blood cells and grow them in the lab where they also train the white blood cells to be able to recognise pieces of the virus involved. Then they put the trained white blood cells back into the body. Now when the white blood cells see a virus-infect cancer cell it can recognise and kill it. This type of treatment can be very, very effective and helps a lot of people with virus-associated cancers.

Comments