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Wiggie49 t1_isjx1m7 wrote

Reply to comment by GWsublime in The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer by AdmiralKurita

Do cancerous cells have identifying proteins that differ from the patient’s cells? Cancers aren’t exactly foreign bodies so wouldn’t they pretty much look the same outside of the fact that they are immortal cancerous cells?

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GWsublime t1_isk9or9 wrote

They do, yes. The mutations that, allow the cells to divide also cause conformatuonal changes. Thats what cancer vaccines target (as do some existing therapies) when the article speaks of triple negative breast cancer it's referring to breast cancer where three surface proteins usually targeted by conventional therapies are absent.

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mcscom t1_isjzcxd wrote

All cancer have some mutations that would make them different from normal tissue. The question is just how targetable those mutations are by the immune system

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Wiggie49 t1_isk18k8 wrote

I thought that was all just visually different, like I thought on a microscopic level it looks the same to our immune system.

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GWsublime t1_iska3b3 wrote

No, our immune system can and does fight cancer, usually very successfully. Unfortunately it can be too slow and when it is you get to a point where the immune system can't keep up or can't access the cancerous tissue

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mcscom t1_iskm9g2 wrote

All cancers (so far) have some amount of DNA changes in them that make them different from the rest of the body. The number and type of DNA mutations varies greatly depending on the type of cancer. Whether and how much these changes are "detectable" by the immune system varies as well, but theoretically it should be possible to design vaccines or other immune therapies for any type of cancer.

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Wiggie49 t1_ismq6u2 wrote

Yeah I was never that great at microbiology, good to kno tho

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