Cool! My company works adjacent to immunotherapy. We work on computer vision to observe microscope slides of cancer biopsies to determine what kinds of immunotherapy might work and their chance of success. An interesting thing is that, with current methods, if the immune system is totally blind to the cancer, immunotherapy doesn’t help much. Part of what our tool does is detect how much the immune system has recognized the cancer. It’s all really cool stuff. I hope mRNA-based immunotherapy can be more effective when the immune system isn’t already aware of something amiss!
That is positively interesting. What’s a crazy fact about the immune system?
I’m not on the medical side of the company, but I did pick up some interesting info from Philipp Dettmer’s Immune book.
The human Immune system is so wildly destructive to the human body, that there are bunches and bunches of failsafes built into it to prevent it from killing you. It’s also why auto Immune diseases are so nasty.
One of the types of immune cells is basically a toxic suicide bomber that, when called to a site of conflict, explodes and unleashes chemical warfare hell on everything indiscriminately. It’s utterly terrifying.
Also, the immune system, like most biological processes, is just based on probabilities. Hopefully, the right two messenger cells touch each other to trigger an immune response. No vision or sound or anything like that. Just need to hope you get lucky enough that they collide into each other. The large numbers of cells and molecules involved makes things pretty likely to happen, but it’s wild to think that everything is kind of luck/probability-based. Then again, maybe it’s not, and I’m just not understanding things well enough. I’m not a doctor
my favourite immune cell is the Macrophage :)
big titty cell
