As we’ve discussed in the past two articles, though the immune system is extremely versatile and powerful, in some individuals, cancer cells are able to develop mechanisms to avoid or even directly block the immune system, allowing them to form life-threatening tumors.

Now, one way to overcome these mechanisms is with the help of drugs like the immune checkpoint inhibitors we focused on in the previous article. But, another class of immunotherapy are adoptive cellular therapies (ACT), which, on a fundamental level, isolate and extract T-cells, expand their populations outside of the body, and then inject them back into the…

I I had to choose something to designate as the one constant reason behind all the actions almost every person takes throughout their life, it would be the pursuit of happiness. We as humans care so much about things like money, social status, romantic and familial relationships, and friendships only because we falsely think that those will lead us to achieving true happiness in our lives.

But, this is where a great mystery of life lies. Even when some people have amassed large amounts of money, have high social status, have a strong romantic relationship, and tons of friends, many…

Note: This is just part 2 of my article series on cancer immunotherapy and covers basic immunology concepts that you might need to know to better understand the remaining articles on specific methodologies for cancer immunology.
If you don’t have prior exposure or understanding of how the immune system works, check out part 1 in the series where I go over the basics of the human immune system, and then come back to continue reading this article!

As obvious as it may seem today, the concept that the immune system was capable of attacking cancer cells was widely ridiculed for…

Note: This is just part 1 of my article series on cancer immunotherapy and covers basic immunology concepts that you might need to know to better understand the remaining articles on specific methodologies for cancer immunology.
This article does assume that you have some understanding of topics like transcription, translation, mitosis and meiosis, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, and cell biology. If you aren’t familiar with these, I’ve linked some resources for different topics throughout the article as they come up, so feel free to read those, understand the topic, and then come back to continue reading the article!

Let’s Start From The Top

You…

Everyone knows that as a person gets older, their health slowly gets worse and worse. From a young age, we’ve seen grandparents and other “old” people suffer from different diseases, frailty, poor eyesight, and a host of other problems.

But what some people might not realize is that it’s not as simple as a linear function where everyone in the world has the same health deterioration at the same age. …

Humanity has come a long way since we first evolved from our ape ancestors. It started slow (extremely slow), with figuring out how to light a fire and make tools using stones, but quickly picked up to the point where, about 200,000 years later, we can manipulate life at the smallest orders of molecules, launch people into space, and even manipulate atoms to meet our desires.

In mid-February, this year, Timothy Abbott, PhD Candidate at Stanford University’s Bioengineering Department, and Dr Marie La Russa, a research scientist working at Dr Stanley Qi’s lab at Stanford, found a way to create a therapeutic agent to prevent all forms of coronavirus.

In this breakthrough research, Abbott was using an approach called PAC-MAN (Prophylactic Antiviral CRISPR in huMAN cells) to attack RNA viruses, which includes the coronavirus family, and degrade their genetic code. …

Survival of the fittest.

The backbone of the Darwinian theory of evolution that we are all familiar with. If a trait makes a certain animal more likely to survive (among other often smaller factors), then that animal will have a higher reproduction rate, leading to more animals in the next generation possessing the advantageous trait. As this cycle continues, the trait eventually becomes common across all members of the species.