cancer immunotherapy

Roaming through your body is a group of specialized immune cells which act stealthily and authoritatively. They "ask" other body cells to show them identification ("papers please!"). If they fail to provide adequate ID those cells are killed on the spot. No questions asked. Scientists are now recruiting these cells to help in the fight against cancer.
Cancer immunotherapy is generating a level of excitement in the medical and scientific community, the likes of which are unprecedented. One scientist's HIV research led him to consider using the HIV virus to kill cancer cells. Cancer immunotherapy could very possibly turn out to be the cure for cancer.
Concluding our two-part series on important melanoma topics, we focus on immunotherapy and the new frontier in the areas of research and treatment by engaging three experts from the Wistar Institute Melanoma Research Center.  
Researchers at Notre Dame University have been able to engineer a switch on immune T cell receptors, enhancing their capacity to recognize foreign proteins on cancer cells, which allows for precision targeting and killing.
Stemming from the American Society of Clinical Oncology gathering in Chicago, it will be difficult not to give into the optimism that is cancer research these days. In conjunction with significant investment from the White House and beyond, the frontier of cancer treatment has never looked so promising.
The immune system of cancer patients fails to recognize aberrant cancer cells as foreign invaders. However, as researchers from the University of Oslo have observed, if grown in the presence of healthy donor cells, donor T cells can recognize cancer cells, which can be used as a potential guide for future cancer treatments.