Marking Cancer Cells for the Immune System

I've always found it fascinating how complex approaches to treating diseases – such as fooling the immune system into attacking cells it was supposed to attack in the first place – are still more efficient that even more complex methods, such as developing brand-new class of drugs.

One of the things several microorganisms do when they invade the body is fool the immune system into thinking that they are harmless. It's up to experts then to wake the immune system up, by forcefully opening its metaphorical eye to what's actually going on.

Scientists from the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL) have recently developed a new method of doing that, which uses DNA sequencing as a foundation. Details of how the approach functions are presented in the video above.

As a side note, it's very interesting to see how the immune system is still better equipped than any drug to handle all scenarios we encounter. It's just that sometimes it's easily fooled (but only by microorganisms that spent the past few eons learning how to do that).