HTHSCI 1DT3 Lecture 4: Immunology_Lec4_Autologous NK cancer treatment
4 Mar 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Natural killer (nk) cells recognize targets stressed by malignant transformation or infection and can be long-lived. They become educated by interacting with major histocompatibility antigen (mhc) class i molecules to gain function to kill targets and produce cytokines. Administer cytokines: nk cells become lakiller cells & show greater cytotoxicity against malignant targets > but limited anti tumour activity of lak cells seen in cancer patients. Critical to improving the activity of the innate immune system is having large numbers of suf ciently activated nk cells which are capable of killing cancer cells. Our laboratory is now able to generate large numbers of nk cells from a small amount of blood collected from cancer patients. Furthermore, we can stimulate these cells through unique protocols to produce highly active cancer killing nk cells. Therefore, it is possible that if these highly active nk cells from a cancer patient were injected back into the same patient (termed autologous.
