Cancer Vaccine That Mimics Lymph Node 53
SubComdTaco writes "Harvard has announced their approach towards an implantable cancer vaccine (press release here). To anyone familiar with how the immune system works, this appears to be a synthetic lymph node, an intriguing bit of biomimicry. From the Science Daily article: 'A cancer vaccine carried into the body on a carefully engineered, fingernail-sized implant is the first to successfully eliminate tumors in mammals, scientists recently reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The new approach, pioneered by bioengineers and immunologists at Harvard University, uses plastic disks impregnated with tumor-specific antigens and implanted under the skin to reprogram the mammalian immune system to attack tumors. The new paper describes the use of such implants to eradicate melanoma tumors in mice. ... The slender implants... are 8.5 millimeters in diameter and made of an FDA-approved biodegradable polymer. Ninety percent air, the disks are highly permeable to immune cells and release cytokines, powerful recruiters of immune-system messengers called dendritic cells. These cells enter an implant's pores, where they are exposed to antigens specific to the type of tumor being targeted. The dendritic cells then report to nearby lymph nodes, where they direct the immune system's T cells to hunt down and kill tumor cells.'"
interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
hmm could this be used for HIV as well then? program the immune system to attack it?
Really cool... (Score:3, Interesting)
unless the foreign components are later found to cause cancer themselves.
Re:Not a immunologist (Score:1, Interesting)
Cancer is triggered by the mutation of a normal cell into one that basically reproduces indefinitely. The worst types of cancer (e.g. small cell carcinoma) are cells that are smaller than normal cells, and these are particularly dangerous because they don't clump together like benign tumors. These ones spread throughout the body and that is why they are so deadly. I'm not quite sure why the body doesn't recognize these cells as "invaders" in the first place. But, if they can synthetically tell the lymph node to produce the antigen needed for the type of cancer, I don't see why the body would not be able to seek it out. If the t-cells then recognize normal cells as invaders, then the person will have all sorts of autoimmune disorders. However, maybe once they get the lymph node out of there after the cancer is killed, it won't be instructing the t-cells to attack these types of cells anymore.