Shiv hosted this table talk on the recent Nobel prize in medicine, which uses techniques of modifying or enhancing the immune system and its components to treat cancer. This is important as cancer, unlike a number of other diseases (viruses, infections) come from cells from the body itself rather than foreign origins, and thus are harder to detect by the immune system. For instance, bacteria which are harmful have markers on their cell surfaces which tell us that they are foreign, which allows our immune cells to eliminate them. In fact, bacteria have their own systems for this, and one that has gained popularity is CRISPR, which acts at a genetic level. The bacteria can recognize phage DNA as being foreign and cleave it to render it moot. However, this is harder with cancer, as all cells in the body have the same genetic composition (at least in principle). Instead, immune cells from the body can now be isolated and removed, grown outside the body, and retrained to target a particular type of cancer, then put back into the body.

It was really interesting to meet Shiv, as the laboratory he does his graduate studies in is in the same department as my research lab. He even knows most of the graduate students in my lab!

For me, this table talk had extremely good timing, because I was just about to learn about CAR-T cells and other immunotherapies for cancer treatment in my intro to biomolecular class. Shiv’s introduction really helped me understand the mechanism of how the treatments worked when I encountered it again in class. Despite having heard of the term before, I was just as much in the dark about how this stuff worked as everyone else. s. I’m very impressed  the idea that immunotherapies can be tweaked to treat all sorts of different cancers: from leukimia to lung cancer to glioblastoma and more. Additionally, I’ve been able to see the benefits of this new technology in action; one of our very close family friends had been diagnosed with late stage lung cancer, and had tried a new experimental immunotherapy which improved his health rapidly, although the cancer has unfortunately since relapsed. I look forward to seeing what these new therapies have in store for solving the mystery behind cancer. If CAR-T, or some other immunotherapy, can be expanded to include virtually every type of cancer possible, then I think we’ve found the cure that medicine has been looking for.

In high school, I once learned about this idea (which ended up becoming one of my favorite applications of physics) called magnetic hyperthermia. It’s an experimental technique for using hyperthermia to fight cancer. It consists on introducing magnetic nanoparticles to cancerous cells and generating an alternating magnetic field. This alternating magnetic field makes the nanoparticles rotate, which generates heat, which in turn either kills the tumor cells or makes them more susceptible to other types of cancer treatment.
Although I got really excited after learning about this, I never really got to learn more about other types of cancer treatment, or learn much about cancer itself.
To make matter worse, since I’m a physics major, I completely stopped having contact with areas such as chemistry and biology after high school. In this sense, when I saw there was a Table Talk on immuno-oncology last Monday, I immediately wanted to hear more about it.

I’ve learned how there are two main ways of fighting cancer through immunotherapy. The first of them consists on modifying, in a laboratory, a portion of the person’s T-cells, stimulating the generation of cancer-specific antigen receptors in them. Those cells are then introduced back to the body to destroy cancerous cells and multiply themselves (this is called the “CAR T-cell” treatment). The other one consists on helping the immune system to identify tumors: by using substances called “checkpoint inhibitors”, the treatment inhibits an interaction between T-cells and cancer cells which would otherwise prevent the immune response. In this way, it allows the detection and destruction of those cancerous cells.

It’s amazing, to me, how there are so many ways of tackling the same issue of cancer, each with its own benefits and risks, and which use completely different ideas from entirely different areas of study. I absolutely loved learning (even if only a bit) about the immunotherapy side of it (which, as I mentioned earlier, is something I probably wouldn’t otherwise learn about). Shiv explained the ideas in a way a layman like me can understand, and even sent us articles and videos to learn more after the talk. I’m really happy to have “opened my eyes” a bit more to these important ideas/techniques I had never heard about before, so I’m very glad I attended the event!