Good news! Cancer is history! The popular science article below also features a background or history on cancer immunotherapy!
Unfortunately, the popular science article below also uses the recent ideological term "pregnant people" instead of pregnant women!
"... immune checkpoints ... many tumors take advantage of them, throwing on these molecular brakes to dampen the antitumor immune response. A common form of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade, or checkpoint inhibition, seeks to counter this kind of immunosuppression by physically blocking the immune checkpoint molecules so they can’t relay inhibitory signals. But while this treatment is successful in some patients, it fails in many others, and scientists don’t entirely know why—or more importantly, how to overcome the tumor’s immunosuppression. Key clues to solving this mystery are coming from an unexpected source: the brain-dwelling parasite Toxoplasma gondii.
The idea of tackling cancer with a brain parasite arose in the 1960s and 1970s when scientists observed that Toxoplasma infection boosted murine immune resistance to several infections and diseases, including cancers. In the decades since, evidence that Toxoplasma infections could aid in cancer treatment has been mounting ...
Around the turn of the twentieth century, New York–based cancer surgeon William Coley made a surprising discovery while reading through old patient records: seven years earlier, a terminal cancer patient had contracted a bacterial infection. This may seem unremarkable, except for the fact that the patient, who should have succumbed to cancer years before, was still alive and doing well. Coley hypothesized that something about the bacterial infection had caused the tumor to shrink, so he started to experiment by injecting his own cancer patients with living or dead bacteria. If patients survived the infection (not all did), they often saw their tumors shrink and their prognoses improve. Eventually, Coley standardized his treatment into a vaccine comprised of dead bacteria known as Coley’s toxin. By injecting patients with it, he could induce cancer-killing inflammation without risking infection with live pathogens. ...
Delivering immune-stimulating treatments directly into tumors has come to be known as in situ vaccination. According to Fiering, the vaccination acts as an adjuvant to jumpstart an antitumor immune response that has often been weakened by a number of self-protection strategies tumor cells deploy. ..."
Around the turn of the twentieth century, New York–based cancer surgeon William Coley made a surprising discovery while reading through old patient records: seven years earlier, a terminal cancer patient had contracted a bacterial infection. This may seem unremarkable, except for the fact that the patient, who should have succumbed to cancer years before, was still alive and doing well. Coley hypothesized that something about the bacterial infection had caused the tumor to shrink, so he started to experiment by injecting his own cancer patients with living or dead bacteria. If patients survived the infection (not all did), they often saw their tumors shrink and their prognoses improve. Eventually, Coley standardized his treatment into a vaccine comprised of dead bacteria known as Coley’s toxin. By injecting patients with it, he could induce cancer-killing inflammation without risking infection with live pathogens. ...
Delivering immune-stimulating treatments directly into tumors has come to be known as in situ vaccination. According to Fiering, the vaccination acts as an adjuvant to jumpstart an antitumor immune response that has often been weakened by a number of self-protection strategies tumor cells deploy. ..."
From the abstract:
"... Treatment with T. gondii ΔGRA17 tachyzoites and anti-PD-L1 therapy significantly extended the survival of mice and suppressed tumor growth in preclinical mouse models of melanoma, Lewis lung carcinoma, and colon adenocarcinoma. Attenuation of the tumor growth was detected in the injected and distant tumors, which was associated with upregulation of innate and adaptive immune pathways. Complete regression of tumors was underpinned by late interferon-gamma-producing CD8+ cytotoxic T cells. ..."
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