On 6 Jul 2017, Marc Perkel outgrape: > Hi Ted, > > You know what's interesting is that the adaptive immune system seems > to work a lot like a spam filter or an antivirus program.
Heh, only if your spamfilters and/or antivirus programs intentionally launch computer viruses at themselves to corrupt themselves to better detect new spam or viruses. This is not a metaphor: this is how B cell production actually works, using elements co-opted from ancient viruses and parasitic DNA to chop up and reshuffle parts of their own genomes to construct new sensors on the fly, and to re-tune those sensors when they spot variants of previously-known pathogens, breeding billions of distinct potential pathogen detectors and then suiciding all of them that don't fit the target well enough or that fit parts of you by mistake; one of the detectors for that case is the very family of receptors that your current therapy is probably suppressing. This does have downsides, because some of the machinery which identifies when those sensors are accidentally attacking the body gets less and less active as we grow older... hence autoimmune diseases get more and more common the older we get. > Technically what I did was a database update to my immune system to > reclassify my cancer as enemy. And the code to kill the cancer is in > the cancer. Yeah, this is forcing off the "hey I am really part of you, you are misfiring, please go away" proteins which virtually all cancers eventually evolve to express (assuming they didn't have them already: they *are* human cells, after all, so they all started out with them). You're extra-unlucky, though: you're a mammal with a hemochorial placenta (or rather you had one once), so you already have several genes that are *meant* to turn ordinary cells into horribly invasive tissues that can invade almost anything and spread at terrifying rates. All the cancer has to do is mess up their regulation and turn them on... -- NULL && (void)
