14 DAY TRIAL // According to investigators at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, it would appear that cells in our blood stream, called B cells, tend to undergo spontaneous changes every day. Some of these changes can turn them cancerous, but our immune system kills them off promptly.
The research group says that it is only through the diligence of the immune system that the incidence of B-cell lymphomas is not currently through the roof. This condition, also called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, currently has no known cure, especially when caught in its later stages.
In a paper published in the January 2 issue of the top scientific journal Nature Medicine, scientists say that immune B cells have a very high potential of turning cancerous without the influence of any external factors. Fortunately, our immune systems are able to deal with these changes on the spot.
This study may have just provided an explanation for why B-cell lymphomas appear to be so rare in the general population, particularly when compared to other types of cancer. Additionally, the new results could potentially be used to develop an early-warning test for this unforgiving condition.
Detecting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in its earliest stages could potentially boost patient survivability rates, by allowing doctors to attack the growing tumors with a proactive treatment. Slowing down tumor growth would buy patients more time, maybe even until a viable cure is developed.
“Each and every one of us has spontaneous mutations in our immune B cells that occur as a result of their normal function. It is then somewhat of a paradox that B cell lymphoma is not more common in the population,” says Dr. Axel Kallies, one of the lead researchers on this study.
“Our finding that immune surveillance by T cells enables early detection and elimination of these cancerous and pre-cancerous cells provides an answer to this puzzle, and proves that immune surveillance is essential to preventing the development of this blood cancer,” he goes on to say.
Kallies co-led the investigation with David Tarlinton, an associate professor at the Institute, and Dr. Stepten Nutt. The team was analyzing the development of B-cell lymphomas when they first saw how immune T cells hunted down and killed errant B cells, Science Blog reports.
“As part of the research, we ‘disabled’ the T cells to suppress the immune system and, to our surprise, found that lymphoma developed in a matter of weeks, where it would normally take years. It seems that our immune system is better equipped than we imagined to identify and eliminate cancerous B cells, a process that is driven by the immune T cells in our body,” Kallies concludes.