Thinking Beyond Science

Our immune system has evolved over 500 million years into a personalized and effective natural defense against disease. It is a complex biology with a seemingly simple mission: to find and destroy anything that’s not supposed to be in our bodies. Cells of the immune system are on constant patrol, hundreds of millions of them circulating throughout the body, slipping in and out of organs, searching out and destroying invaders that make us sick and body cells that have become infected, mutated, or defective— cells like cancer.

Cancer immunotherapy is the approach that works to defeat the tricks, unmask cancer, unleash the immune system, and restart the battle. It differs fundamentally from the other approaches we have to cancer, because it does not act upon cancer at all, not directly. Instead it unlocks the killer cells in our own natural immune system and allows them to do the job they were made for.

Cancer is us. It’s the mistake that works. Cells in the body regularly go rogue, their chromosomes knocked out by particles of sunlight or toxins, mutated by viruses or genetics, age, or sheer randomness. Most of these mutations are fatal to the cell, but a few survive and divide.

The innate immune system is charismatic and deceptively straightforward. It also happens to have cells big enough to be seen wiggling and eating under the microscope. That includes amoeba-like cells adept at squeezing between body cells and patrolling our perimeter (inside and out, we have a surface larger than a doubles tennis court), looking for what shouldn’t be there and killing it.

These cells include small blobby smart patrollers called dendrites and similar but larger blobby characters called macrophages (literally, “big eaters”). Among their other jobs, these serve as the garbagemen of the immune system. Mostly what they eat are retired body cells—normal cells that have hit their expiration date and politely self-destructed. They also eat bad guys.

Macrophages have an innate ability to recognize simple invaders. These foreign, or non-self cells, are recognizable as foreign because they look different that is, the fingerprint of chemical arrangements of proteins on their surfaces is different. Macrophages look for anything they recognize as foreign, then grab and gobble it.

These cells also end up saving little pieces of the invader cells they kill, creating a show-and-tell for the rest of the immune system. (We’ve also recently discovered that some innate immune cells are more than just simple eaters and killers they seem to be the brains of the larger immune system.)

Source : The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer by Charles Graeber

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39088907-the-breakthrough

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