An Interesting Theory on Cancer and the Immune System

The next decade will see the introduction of a wide range of comparatively sophisticated methods of manipulating the human immune system: tuning its reaction to specific biochemicals, altering the processes of inflammation, and training it attack and destroy unwanted cells or waste byproducts of metabolism. This will be good news for those people unfortunate to suffer autoimmune diseases, amongst others: the immune system touches on every important aspect of our biology in some way, shape, or form, and the decline of the immune system with age is an important component of the frailty that accompanies degenerative aging.

Bearing that in mind, I noticed an interesting open access paper the other day that advances an almost hormetic theory of cancer development. To the author's way of thinking, while the immune system does indeed attack and destroy cancer - and this is one of its primary tasks - cancers nonetheless thrive under sustained but weak immune attacks. Thus a damaged immune system may be doing more harm than good in this respect.

Cancer immunotherapy by immunosuppression

We have previously suggested, based largely upon mouse studies, that incipient cancers are probably stimulated to grow by a stimulatory immune reaction. We think the evidence suggests that a new expanded hypothesis is tenable: any tumor that continues to grow is probably being continuously immunologically stimulated by a low level of immunity. We will also discuss the therapeutic implications of this new hypothesis. Almost the entire literature seems currently to be predicated upon the assumption that the immune response is "surveying" and inhibiting cancer, if indeed it does anything. Our new hypothesis admits the persisting possibility of a cure by sufficiently raising the level of the immune reaction via immunizations of various types, but recognizes that this has not yet met with unmitigated success and that there may be an alternative.

Read the rest of the paper for the arguments that lead to this position - that suppressing the immune system is worth trying as a cancer therapy. As a theory it makes some sense at my level of understanding of the various processes involved, but this is all off at the other end of the pool of ideas from the mainstream of cancer and immunological research. The focus there is on enhancing and training the immune system to destroy cancer, an approach that is achieving very promising results in the laboratory and early trials - which is not even to talk about the granulocyte therapy that I think is the present grail of the field.

You might recall that people were enthused a few years back over the work of researcher Zheng Cui, who showed that (a) one breed of lab mice shug off cancer because their immune cells are different in ways that enable them to kill cancer dead, (b) transplanting those immune cells into more vulnerable mice also kills cancer dead, and (c) this same state of affairs exists in humans. Somewhere, someone has an immune system that can kill your cancer. If you could find them and undergo a transplant of leukocyte or granulocyte immune cells, the evidence to date suggests that this would be a very effective therapy.

If nothing else, the paper I quote above is a good example of the fact that no field of science is monolithic - and that there are always a good few plausible ideas that run contrary to current mainstream thinking. Perhaps these researchers are on to something, perhaps not; further investigation will show one way or another.

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