Question: Is there a way of improving the bodies immune system to repel cancer cells?

Ross King answered on 7 Nov 2015:

Definitely – scientists are very interested in improving our immune systems in order to prevent or stop cancer from growing and spreading.

Actually, our immune systems usually do a pretty good job at making sure cancer can’t start. Specialised cells called cytotoxic T cells (‘cyto’ means ‘cell’ in Greek, so ‘cell-toxic’) can recognise cancer cells in our body and kill them pretty quickly. Obviously, sometimes things can go wrong and our T cells are unable to stop the cancer. Sometimes, T cells don’t really ‘see’ the cancer cell, or they are unable to recognise that it is a cancer cell.

One thing scientists are looking at right now is taking T cells out of cancer patients and changing them in the lab so that they are much better at recognising a cancer cell when they see one. They then put these improved cells back into the patient, where the idea is that the T cells will be much more effective at hunting down cancer cells and eventually killing them. I think things are still quite early days with these treatments, but I know people are very excited about how effective they might be. Fingers crossed!