Progress in creating the immune system against cancer

A recent study featured in MIT Technology Review, a team of scientists at Johns Hopkins could this close to achieving a breakthrough in the treatment of cancer. The research results show that bacteria may help destroy cancer cells in patients with liver cancer, lung or pancreas. 

Many doctors and researchers trying to treat cancer without resorting to radio and chemo therapy as both weaken the patient. But even new treatments such as the “magic bullet” that directly target specific cancer cells have serious side effects.

In clinical experiments, scientists at Johns Hopkins injected animals with a cancerous tumor with bacteria that reproduce rapidly in the centers of solid tumors that lack oxygen and die healthy tissue oxygen. The researchers got the bacteria destroy tumors from the inside out, leaving an outer ring easily treatable cancer cells to conventional treatments.

But in addition to achieving this, the researchers noted that in many cases, bacterial infection “trained” the immune system of animals to recognize and attack cancer. In 23 of the 70 animals used, the actual responsiveness of their immune system destroyed the remnants of the tumor, without resorting to another type of therapy. Even when the animals were injected with cancer cells from the same new type of cancer, your immune system was able to identify attack and destroy them, this time without receiving further injections of bacteria.

The scientists then experimented with mice and rats, observing the same type of results, which could be a future treatment applicable to humans.