Researchers discovered that injecting inactive flu virus directly into solid tumors triggered a systemic anti-tumor immune response. Thus, seasonal flu vaccines or other inactivated virus vaccines could be repurposed as agents that convert immune “cold” tumors into immune hot ones. Newman and colleagues found that influenza infection, which is respiratory virus that infects the lungs, … Read more
Antibodies are proteins. In the body, they are made by B cells of the immune system. To produce antibodies as therapeutics, they are synthesized by cells in culture. The structure of an antibody is defined by the amino acid sequence of the protein (Figure 1). The incredible diversity of antibodies, which is essential to our … Read more
Cellular and whole-body metabolism changes with age. An emerging idea is that preventing these metabolic changes may reduce negative effects of aging or at least delay them. Indeed, this idea is popular enough that companies are developing and selling dietary supplements intended to boost “healthy” metabolism. Many are intended to boost the amount of a … Read more
Cancerous tumors must evade immune destruction to survive. They can achieve this by preventing the immune cells from gaining access to the tumor (“immune cold”) or by tipping the balance of immunoactivating and immunosuppressing signals toward immunosuppression. Immunosuppression means that, even if the immune cells penetrate the tumor, they cannot kill the cancer. The cytotoxicity … Read more
Some diseases arise because the immune system reacts with normal, healthy cells in the body. In other diseases, lack of an effective immune response contributes to the disease. Cancer cells escape attack by the immune system, in part, by producing a lot of the protein PD-L1 (Gough, 24 May 2017). PD-L1 binds and activates the … Read more