Tumor Cells Fight Back to Beat Immune System

摘要

One of the biggest puzzles of cancer is why the sufferer's immune system almost always fails to eliminate the tumor. Researchers suspected that tumor cells survive by evading immune detection or damping down the immune response. But new research reported in this issue (p. 1363) suggests that at least one kind of cancer cells has a tactic that goes much further than mere evasion: They kill the immune cells that attack them. A team of Swiss researchers has shown that melanoma cells bear on their surface a molecule that induces immune cells to commit suicide through a process called apoptosis.