TUMOR IMMUNE EVASION AND IMMUNE TOLERANCE
Harnessing the immune system for effective cancer therapy has remained a great challenge. The major limiting factor for successful use of the immune system to eliminate the last tumor cell is the tumor’s powerful ability to suppress or avoid an immune system attack. Although cancers often elicit a vigorous immune response during the early part of their growth, the immune response that is elicited is often suppressed by the tumor. Subsequent attempts to enhance or educate the immune response through cancer vaccines fail to elicit anti-tumor immunity because they are not able to overcome this ability of the tumor to evade or suppress the immune response.
The human immune system is designed to destroy foreign ‘non-self’ proteins. However, in the case of a normal pregnancy the fetus is foreign to the mother, yet despite mother’s immune cells circulating to the fetus they do not destroy the fetus. WHY?
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The placenta produces an array of chemical signals which put the immune cells which are programmed to kill foreign tissues asleep. This is a natural immunosuppression mechanism. |
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Tumors have learned to produce the same array of chemical signals as produced by a placenta. These chemicals act to suppress an immune attack against the tumor allowing the tumor to grow unaffected by immune cells programmed to kill. This is a major reason why tumor vaccines which educate and produce tumor killing immune cells fail to eradicate the tumor. |
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The array of chemicals that are released when immune cells are mixed with foreign cells are capable of disabling the suppressive chemical signals produced by tumors and a normal placenta. This is the reason that a transplanted immune system is such a powerful cancer killer. This is also the reason that the Mirror Effect™ is expected to have an significant anti-tumor effect where other immunotherapies have failed. |
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