Last modified on Wed 5 May 2021 18.40 EDT
The number of people being diagnosed with cancer early in England has plummeted during the Covid pandemic, sparking fears that many will only be treated when
it is too late to save them.
Official figures show a third fewer cancers were detected at stage one, when the chances of survival are highest, in the early months of the pandemic than during the same months a year before.
Cancer experts fear that the figures, which have been collected by Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service, mean thousands of people have the disease but have not yet started treatment because of “a shift to later diagnosis”. They urged anyone with possible symptoms of the disease to get them checked out immediately.
While it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, a cancer treatment in which a patient’s own cells are engineered to hunt down and wipe out their disease and then linger in the body to stop the cancer returning is helping to save patients’ lives.
The results of the treatment, known as CAR T-cell therapy, have been astonishing.
Patients who had exhausted all other options and been told they had just months to live have gone into remission. Others have even been cured by the one-off dose.
In trials, all signs of cancer disappeared in more than 80 per cent of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia the most common cancer in children after receiving CAR T-cells.
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The human immune system comprises functionally specialised cellular defence mechanisms that protect the body against disease. These include the dendritic cells. Their main function is to present antigens to other immune cells, especially T cells, thereby activating a primary immune response. Dendritic cells are divided into Type 1 (DC1) and Type 2 (DC2) dendritic cells. Each type fulfils different functions: DC1 provide an immune response to bacteria and viruses, DC2 protect against fungal or parasitic infections. In a recent study conducted at MedUni Vienna s Institute of Cancer Research, researchers found that a particular group of proteins plays a major role in the development of Type 1 dendritic cells. This could open up new therapeutic options in the defence against viruses or bacteria but also for cancer immunity.
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