Cancer grows in the body because the body’s
immune system fails to see the cancer cells as destructive and
foreign to the body. Hence the cancer is never attacked by the
immune system in a cancer patient.
The immune cells responsible for the recognition
of cancer cells as faulty are called Dendritic Cells. With Dendritic
Cell Therapy the immune system of the patient is trained to try and
recognize the cancer cells as faulty and to turn the immune system
on to start attacking the cancer cells.
First a cancer tissue sample is obtained from the
patient, usually via a biopsy. Then blood is drawn from the patient
and the specific patient’s own dendritic cells are cultured from the
blood. Once the cells are mature, they are then exposed outside the
body, in the laboratory, to the cancer tissue taken from the
patient. For some reason or another the dendritic cells are
sometimes able to identify the cancer tissue as faulty outside the
body. These “trained” dendritic cells are then re-injected back into
the patient with the idea that they will transfer the recognition
pattern of the cancer tissue to the rest of the body’s immune
system.
The immune system is then switched on to start
attacking the cancer on it’s own. This therapy has been proven to be
fairly effective in malignant melanoma as well as mesothelioma
patients. We are now combining this technique with
IPT in order to try and maximise
the response in our patients.
