(Jacob Banas/ Futurism.com) — Fighting cancer with the body’s own immune system is no easy task. Sometimes cancer may cause the dendritic cells to behave in unusual ways and not function properly. There’s also the chance your body might reject the treatment all together. By creating immune cells from a patient’s own body, the chance of rejection is drastically reduced.
This process, called direct reprogramming, was recently published in the journal Science Immunology and is not only effective, but fast as well.
“From a tissue section taken from the skin, we can cultivate millions of cells and reprogram them to dendritic cells in a process that takes only nine days”, said Filipe Pereira, the leader of the research team that conducted the study. (…)