Milwaukee, WI (PRWEB) July 14, 2022 The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) announces the 2022 class of Fellows of the Academy of Immuno-Oncology
The Intriguing History of Cancer Immunotherapy – The Greanville Post greanvillepost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greanvillepost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Follicular lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells, is usually incurable. Patients cycle through periods of therapy that partially shrink their cancers, before the disease progresses again. That’s what appeared to be happening with a 61-year-old man in Italy: Diagnosed with cancer in August of 2019, he promptly began a course of chemotherapy, completing it in February 2020. All that was left to do was monitor the tumor’s growth. So when a June scan revealed that the patient’s tumor appeared to be growing, Martina Sollini, a professor of nuclear medicine at Humanitas University in Italy, and her colleagues weren’t surprised. Until the biopsy came back negative. Another biopsy and a follow-up scan in September confirmed the original findings: The cancer had gone into complete remission. His medical team was left to figure out how. They turned to a curious explanation: Perhaps the cancer’s sudden remission had something to do with the fact that the patient had, that spring, been infected with SARS-CoV-2. After ruling out other possibilities, they published a case study in February, documenting one of a few instances over the course of the pandemic in which researchers suspect that a case of COVID-19 might have caused a tumor to shrink. And while the phenomenon is rare, it shows the potential of carefully administered viral therapies to treat cancer in the future.
The Beginnings From ancient Egypt, some 3,000 years ago, to the early nineteenth century there have been multiple anecdotal reports of tumors disappearing spontaneously or after an infection with concomitant high fever (3, 4). The similarity between cancer and inflammation was described for the first time by the Greek physician, Galen, who noted that cancer might evolve from inflammatory lesions (5). The first scientific attempts to modulate patients immune systems to cure cancer can be attributed to two German physicians, Fehleisen and Busch, who independently noticed significant tumor regression after erysipelas infection (4). They both described their observations and tried to repeat them later on, with little success (4). Eventually, Fehleisen managed to properly identify the bacterial strain responsible for the erysipelas and tumor shrinkage as