Get Cancer Immunity 4:2 (2004) - ARTICLE - Archive Cancerimmunity

Cancer can weaken the immune system by spreading into the bone marrow. The bone marrow makes blood cells that help to fight infection. This happens most often in leukaemia or lymphoma, but it can happen with other cancers too. The cancer can stop the bone marrow from making so many blood cells.

Cancer cells, by nature, are antigenic, meaning that the immune system recognizes them as hostile under normal circumstances. In response, cancer cells have developed a number of mechanisms to circumvent or suppress immune-mediated targeting and killing – collectively referred to as “immune evasion.”

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps your immune system fight cancer. The immune system helps your body fight infections and other diseases. It is made up of white blood cells and organs and tissues of the lymph system. Immunotherapy is a type of biological therapy.

The cancer-immunity cycle is a process initiated by the release of cancer cell antigens that concludes with the destruction of cancer cells. Daniel S. Chen, MD, PhD, and Ira Mellman, PhD, detail the steps of the cancer-immunity cycle in a manuscript published in the journal Cell Press in 2013.

Some cancer cells adapt mechanisms to evade detection and destruction by the host's immune system. One way cells do this is by hijacking normal mechanisms of immune checkpoint control and modulation of the innate immune response via STING.

Immune evasion mechanisms include the promotion of antiapoptotic factors, loss of tumor antigen expression, secretion of local immunosuppressive factors in the tumor microenvironment (e.g., interleukin (IL)-10, transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase ...

The hallmarks constitute an organizing principle for rationalizing the complexities of neoplastic disease. They include sustaining proliferative signaling, evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death, enabling replicative immortality, inducing angiogenesis, and activating invasion and metastasis.

List of hallmarks CapabilitySimple analogyInsensitivity to anti-growth signals"brakes don't work"Evading apoptosiswon't die when the body normally would kill the defective cellLimitless replicative potentialinfinite generations of descendantsSustained angiogenesistelling the body to give it a blood supply2 more rows