Re: Questions: Angiogenesis in Cancer

In article <1119613450.305230.68860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
kumar <lordshiva5753@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Yes, we may need to understand about cancer & other latent conditions
>more deeply--what is to body's immune defence mechanism on strengthning
>of immune system--medicated or natural? Whether strong immune system
>can handle them within tumor or they need to be exposed & come out of
>tumor to kill them be immune system? Can immune system kill cancer
>cells within tumor, when it is suitably strong?
>
>Taruma, injury, stresses, infections etc. can weaken immune system, so
>we should understand surgery to this effec

If only things were so simple -- if only immune systems could be simply
characterised as "strong" or "weak", like muscles!

The really hard part is that a cancer isn't like an infection. It's
made up of your own cells, which your body will and should identify as
"self" not "invader". Is an immune system "strong" or "weak" when it
gets confused about self and other and attacks normal tissues, causing
disease like type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis,
lupus and many others?

Immunotherapies for cancers are continually being developed. The idea
is to get the patient's immune system to regard the cancer as "alien"
and attack it. These methods are always promising, but never good
enough to get into standard use. But the effort is certainly
worthwhile, even though it's known that cancers will mutate fast enough
to evade even an immune system that has been sensitized to them.
Further research may result in more reliable immunotherapies.

The immune system is believed to be involved in suppressing virally
induced cancers at an early stage. We have an experiment of nature in
the form of the several viral-caused cancers that are so common in HIV+
individuals. People who take immune-suppression drugs in connection
with organ transplants also develop cancers at an unusually high rate.
Cancer is mainly a disease of older people, and the immune system
becomes less effective with age, although this particular correlation
is not the best evidence for causation.

AFAIK, the best theory about spontaneous remissions is that the
patient's immune system suddenly decides that the cancer is alien, and
attacks and destroys it as an invader. Immunotherapy is an effort to
induce this effect artificially, and it's a very active area of
research. It's not simple, because finding a marker the immune system
can identify, that isn't found on any normal cell, is not trivial.

As far as angiogenesis, the immune system acts through white blood
cells and antibodies carried in the blood. If a tissue has no blood
supply, the immune system can't act in it. But a tissue with no blood
supply isn't going to grow, or in most cases, survive. A tumor that
can express angiogenesis promoting factors will survive and grow. Most
cancers aren't very good at providing themselves with an effective
blood supply throughout and die at the core of the tumor, resulting in
the appalling smell many cancer patients develop as the dead tissue
breaks down while the tumor continues to grow nearer its surface, and
in metastatic tumors which have a higher ratio of surface to volume.

.

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