'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer by Harnessing Immune System Clears Key Hurdle

Re:'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer by Harnessing Immune Sys... by suddenseizure on Thursday July 13, 2017 @01:16PM (#14763098)

The downside with adaptive immune system therapy (like CAR-T therapy) is that it doesn't work as well with cancers with fewer mutations that the T cell can detect as anomalous.

My wife has brain cancer and has been reading about all the immunotherapies available. Unfortunately brain cancer tends to have much fewer mutations than say, lung cancer. However there are innate immune system therapies being researched that might be more promising in those cases.

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Re:'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer by Harnessing Immune Sys... by sjg007 on Thursday July 13, 2017 @04:40PM (#14764982)

So sorry to hear this. It sounds like you guys are doing the right research. Being in a similar boat, I think that the checkpoint inhibitors look very promising. I try to keep up with the field as best I can. The hard part is you have to find an appropriate clinical trial for whatever you and your doctor think is best... Also, just as an FYI, the NCI is starting up a new precision medicine trial (NCI-MATCH) to target specific pathways instead of tumors... but I'm more of the opinion you have to do combination chemotherapy and modalities unless the drug is super effective. But then again I'm not an oncologist or a doctor.

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Re:'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer by Harnessing Immune Sys... by inlined on Thursday July 13, 2017 @10:43PM (#14767031)

Very sorry to hear about your wife. I assumed one of the other problems would be the blood brain barrier. Could this therapy overcome that too?

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