The good fight

Can the body8217;s own defences be harnessed to outwit tumours 8211; that8217;s the big question driving immunotherapy, an entire front in the war against cancer that just got a big boost in credibility. Cancer is biologically baffling 8212; it is unclear what causes stray cells to simply rebel and destroy the whole system, and cause the body to turn against itself. The immune system which can expertly identify and protect against alien invasions like viruses and bacteria, has no defences against these pretenders which pass as normal cells. But if a protein could be identified that was made only on the surface of a cancer cell, it could be used as the basis of a vaccine to train the body to attack the diseased cells, and much of cancer research concentrates on making this work. Now, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, fortified immune system T-cells injected back into a patient8217;s body have caused his melanoma to recede 8212; a result that caused great excitement in the scientific community and great expectations outside it.

This kind of immunotherapy 8212; collecting CD4 T-cells from nine melanoma patients, isolating single cells that would target a certain protein on the tumour cells, cultivating and enriching these cells, and then re-infusing them into the patient 8212; could be a vast improvement on invasive methods like chemotherapy and radiation. They work as smart bombs against melanoma, but strengthened by sophisticated technologies.

It is too early to pin big hopes on this development. Given how expensive and complex it is, this is far from being standard therapy. And, more importantly, we still don8217;t know if it works 8212; large-scale clinical trials are yet to be conducted. Given the tiny sample size of these tests, the immunotherapy findings could be more dumb luck than a demonstrable cure. As the study8217;s authors pointed out, these findings light the way for future research 8212; they help refine existing understandings of what conditions are necessary for an anti-cancer immune response to work.