OF DANIEL WEBSTER, RUDYARD KIPLING, CAPTAIN KIRK - and CANCER

A somewhat peculiar picture of Linda and me

Where?  When?



“It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college.  Yet there are those who love it!”

This was Daniel Webster, commenting on Dartmouth College.

Well, I’m no Daniel Webster, that’s for sure – and I have never even visited Dartmouth College – but I could learn to love the place.  That is because of some promising research going on at that institution regarding the use of immune reactions to stifle ovarian cancer.  The following may not make sense, but here goes anyway:  Although I understand only the tiniest fraction of what these guys have done, I am encouraged just the same.

I tried, God knows I tried.  I read the news release.  I used Google Scholar, located the article, and read the abstract.   I tried to access the entire article (to look at the figures), but I was told “access denied”.  So, hell, here is what, in my blinding ignorance, I think is going on.

These guys are working with mice, in which they (inhumanely, but necessarily) have planted ovarian cancer.  They insert “an attenuated and safe” strain of a certain bacteria (Listeria monocytogenes, if you must know) into the little beasts.  This somehow changes the “tumor microenvironment” in such a way as to induce “immunosuppressive cells” to cease protecting the tumor, and instead go for its jugular.  There is much discussion of cytokines and chemokines. These are small signaling proteins that are important in the immune system, and elsewhere; if you want to know more, go to Google, like I did.  Apparently this kind of therapy is being tested on pancreatic cancer, as well as ovarian.

A quote may help:  “Now that we can engineer microorganisms to make them safe to use and also can track anti-tumor immune response in great detail, it has new potential for use in cancer treatment”.  As heard in Star Trek:  “Make it so!”

 And that, Dearly Beloved (to quote Kipling this time), is as far as I am going with this. 

Oh, here is the title of the article.  See how many words you recognize.  Attenuated Listeria monocytogenes reprograms M2-polarized tumor-associated macrophages in ovarian cancer leading to iNOS-mediated tumor cell lysis.

Finally, my hits counter informs me that nobody read any of my blogs yesterday, and nobody has read any so far today, either.  You don’t want to hurt my feelings, do you?