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Scientists from Cardiff University believe they may have found a new type of therapy to fight off cancer. Cancer is the term used for a collection of diseases caused by faulty cells in the human body. Cells make up our body and come in all different shapes and sizes, ranging from red blood cells to brain cells, and can only be seen under a microscope.
To allow the human body to grow, cells need to multiply through the process of mitosis, which consists of five different stages: interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase. Sometimes, however, new cells do not divide properly and turn into cancer cells. As cancer cells, they no longer cooperate with the rest of the body and focus entirely on keeping themselves alive. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells never stop dividing. They keep doubling until they expand into a lump, called a tumour, and can rapidly spread through the body. This means the group of cells which is impacted will stop your body working and keep itself healthy. Doctors are not sure why some people have malfunctioning cells and others do not.
This new treatment developed by the team in Cardiff works with cells in the patient’s immune system called T-cells, which is a type of white blood cell. These cells are in charge of protecting the human body. They move around in the veins in order to detect faulty cells and destroy them. Doctors actually already use T-cells to counter cancer, but it only had a chance against blood cancer, and how well it worked varied from person to person. This breakthrough in medicine is quite simple but powerful. Firstly, the T-cells are taken from a patient’s blood. During it’s time in the lab, the blood cell’s receptors are “programmed” to find and attack cancer cells. The refined T-cells are then injected back into the patient. What follows is that the T-cells track down and kill the harmful cells. When you take into account that between 25,000 and 80,000 T-cells can be found in a single drop of blood and to save a life you only need one, this has revolutionised the understanding of the human body for years to come. In lab tests, the T-cell found and banished a wide range of cancer cells, and did not harm any healthy cells.
This discovery could potentially have drastic consequences on the impact of cancer on the human body, but when it faces the final test of a proper cancer case, will it rise to the occasion?