Which doesn’t sound all that great, but here’s an analogous approach involving a cancer afflicting the Tasmanian Devil, who have been miserably decimated (or, my Arts Editor would point out, far worse than decimated, since decimated merely means losing a tenth) by this cancer. In the following, MHC refers to a set of proteins on a cell’s surface which identifies it as “being from here,” but neurological cells often hide these, at least in the Devils, and these fatal cancers are thought to be from the neurological system. From NewScientist (6 January 2018, paywall):
[Gregory Woods at the University of Tasmania] was recently tinkering with the vaccine when he discovered something quite remarkable. He grew tumour cells in a liquid spiked with cytokines, which are molecules that turn on a cell’s MHC labels. Then he injected the cells into afflicted devils. Over time, their tumours began to shrink and, in some cases, disappeared completely. “It’s a bit odd, treating cancer with cancer,” says Woods. Still, he can’t argue with the striking results.
It’s fascinating. It suggests that the injected cells are telling the cancerous cells to turn on their MHCs, and then the immune system exterminates them. There may not be much application of this particular bit of knowledge, but it’s still fascinating.
Unless a new MHC could be forcibly attached to cancer cells.
