Question: hi david i would like to know that since some cancers are in the cells can you program other cells to attack the cancerous cell to kill it before it spreads thank you!

David MacLean answered on 17 May 2022:

Hi Thomas!

What a great question! So actually, all cancers are made up from cells. Cancers are cells that have changed their DNA so that they can out-live the other cells. They can do this in many many ways! There are ways that mean the cells grow too much or they can do things like hide from the body’s immune system.

In answer to your question, this actually happens all the time in the body! So when cells multiply, sometimes they can go wrong and if left to carry on multiplying, they could turn into cancer. So there are cells in your immune system which can detect any cell that doesn’t look too normal and get rid of them as soon as possible.

As I said above, there are ways that cancer can hide from the immune system and it’s these ones that are the tricky ones to deal with.

Now, I am not an expert in this next part but I have heard of a thing (and with a little help from google) called CAR T-cells. This is where you can force your immune cells to recognise a cancer as being bad. This means that the cancers that are hidden from the immune system, can now be recognised! Now it sounds great and like it will solve a lot of cancers but it is still being tested so it is not definite that it works yet.

Great question Thomas.