Follicular News

Fascinating Follicular news out of the University of Rochester yesterday: researchers are looking closely at the possibility of using the body's immune system to fight Follicular NHL.

The big news in Cancerland a few weeks ago concerned that very small trial (3 leukemia patients), where doctors manipulated the patients' own immune systems to fight off their cancer. The article linked above isn't the same thing, but it involves the same principle.

There have been lots of studies recently that have looked at the microenvironment of tumors: not the cancer cells themselves, but the immediate area surrounding them, and all of the stuff that's in that area, and everything happening in that area. For this study on fNHL, researchers isolated T cells, one of the types of white blood cells in the immune system, in infected lymph nodes. They found that the T cells in the nodes were arrayed differently than normal T cells. Not so surprising. But more surprising was that when those T cells were removed from the nodes, and thus from the microenvironment, they behaved like normal cells. Pretty clear evidence that the microenvironment plays some role.

The scientists speculate that the T cells, which fight off invaders in the body, are being shut off by the microenvironment. If they can figure out what exactly is doing the shutting off, they can fix that, and the T cells will go back to fighting the invaders -- in this case, the cancer cells.

This is another step toward that broad goal of having the body fight off the cancer on its own -- the ideal, really, since it would use the body's own defenses rather than some artificial agent.

Certainly something to keep an eye on.