(Bump) Transforming cancer research to tackle COVID-19 - Professor Lindy Durrant (A very useful arti23 Jul 2020 09:35
Bumping again...because...you know...
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/impactcampaign/news-and-views/items/news/alt/2020/transforming-cancer-research-to-tackle-covid-19.aspx
"Transforming cancer research to tackle COVID-19:
If you ever needed confirmation of how dedicated and just plain clever our cancer researchers are, it is being demonstrated by their response to coronavirus. Professor Lindy Durrant is a specialist in Immunotherapy at the University of Nottingham and has spent many years dedicated to cancer research - she is now using an adaptation of her research in an attempt to create a coronavirus vaccine, here she tells us how:
I’m Professor of Immunotherapy at the University of Nottingham, which in essence means looking at how we use the immune system to target cancer. There are two arms to the immune system; one is antibodies, which are proteins which latch onto cells and bring in other cells to kill them and the other is ‘T-cells’, which are really good at recognising cells which are infected with a virus and killing them (including cancer cells).
It's all about the T-cells
When you first contract a viral infection a virus gets inside a cell and then starts replicating. Once it’s inside a cell it’s almost invisible to antibodies. The immune system then develops T-cells, which have a molecule on the surface which acts like a porthole for the T-cell to look inside a cell to see if it is infected or not. If it sees lots of viruses being made it will kill the cell, which is in effect stopping the factory making any more of the virus and is the most effective way of tacking the infection.
The immune system would then also create an antibody response, just in case in killing the infected cell something leaked out or there was a new infection, the antibodies stop any new virus from even getting into a cell. But the T-cells are always the first line of defence."
"...Turning talk into action:
My expertise is cancer, infectious disease is a field with its own nuances and problems so it wasn’t an area I had looked into before. But a vaccine is a vaccine. Whether you are stimulating the immune system against cancer or infectious disease, in simple terms it makes no difference."
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