Due to inflammation, which can be caused by coronavirus or organ transplantation, the body increases the level of cells that help the immune system fight tumors.
Medical statistics show that the incidence of certain types of cancer has decreased during the covid epidemic. Maybe this is just a coincidence, maybe, to put it carefully, there simply weren’t enough resources to diagnose everything that wasn’t Covid; but it may be that there is some kind of cause-and-effect relationship here. In any case, to the employees Northwestern University managed to decipher the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 infection is able to suppress cancer tumors.
As you know, the immune system must also fight malignant cells, but it does not always succeed. On the one hand, tumors have various tricks that help them avoid immune attack, on the other hand, immune cells themselves are not always able to reach a malignant neoplasm. This happens with monocytes, which wander through tissues and are among the first to detect various problems. Like most immune cells, monocytes have functional varieties – in particular, some of them are quite capable of recognizing malignant cells, but cannot leave the bloodstream into surrounding tissues. In an article in Journal of Clinical Investigation it is said that during Covid, such monocytes retain a certain receptor, which allows them to leave the blood vessel and reach the tumor site. Once inside the tumor, the “receptor-enhanced monocytes” release a signaling molecule that attracts another type of immune cell, called natural killer (NK) cells. Further, through the efforts of NK cells, tumor growth noticeably slows down.
The appearance of the necessary monocytes is due to the immune response to viral RNA; their level also increases with inflammation that accompanies organ transplantation. In other words, it’s not so much about the coronavirus as it is about certain immune reactions; It’s just that the researchers, as they say, had patients with Covid and post-transplant problems on hand. Experiments on mice have shown that using monocytes with the desired receptor, it is possible to suppress the growth of melanoma, as well as tumors of the breast, lungs and colon. They also tested a compound on mice that increases the level of such monocytes – it was tested quite successfully, which means that you don’t have to have Covid to set your immune system against cancer. In the future, the researchers plan to move on to clinical tests to see if this method can be used to treat real human tumors that are not amenable to other types of therapy.
Source: www.nkj.ru
