Save a Horse Ride a T-Cell

When I was young I went horse back riding with my family. I was so excited to lead the horse around to all sorts of cool places, but shortly after I started riding I learned that this was not the case. The horse had walked the trail so many times that he knew exactly where the trail went and no matter how hard I tried I could not make the horse turn off on to a different trail. I was just along for the ride and no amount of effort would change the final destination. T cells behave in much the same way as these horses.

T-cells are an important part of our immune system. They are often referred to as the foot soldiers of immunology. Being the foot soldiers T cells know exactly where to go to reach any area in need an immunological response, such as wounds or cancerous tissue. So scientists have cleverly figured out if they can get a cancer killer attached to the T cell the killer can have a free safe ride straight to the cancer site. There it will hop off and start to kill cancerous cells. So in my analogy the T cell is the horse, I am the cancer killer just stuck along for the ride, and the stable at the end of our trail is the cancer. The horse will deliver me safe and sound to the stable no matter how much I fight to go somewhere else, just like the T cell will deliver the cancer killer right to the cancer wiping it out. Hooray, we beat cancer just by thinking about horses! Well there are still a few things to figure out, but being able to get the cancer killer to the site without detection and destruction by our own immune systems is a major step forward. The Mayo Clinic has successfully completed this process in mice with cancerous tumors using a type of retrovirus as the cancer killer. A retrovirus is just a type of virus that carries its genetic code as RNA instead of DNA. The virus inserts its RNA into the cell and forces it to make DNA from it and the DNA in turn will tell the cancerous cell to be self destructive. This whole process still needs to go though much more testing before it can even start trials on humans, but theoretically this looks very promising.