Cancer Under Siege

What am I looking at?

This is scanning electron microscopy image of an oral squamous cancer cell with two cytotoxic T cells attached to it. The cancer cell is white (1), and the T cells are red (2).

Biology in the background

The concept of immunotherapy for cancer is based on the idea of getting the patient’s own immune system to fight the cancerous cells. This concept has been around for a while, but progress in the field has faced several roadblocks. The main confounding issue has been how to get the immune system to target just the cancer cells and not healthy cells. However, breakthroughs in personalized medicine have allowed researchers to isolate unique markers from an individual patient’s cancer cells and use nanoparticles to present these markers to the immune system as targets, or antigens.

Once these antigens are presented to the immune system and it has been stimulated, then specialized cells (including T cells like those seen in this image) can recognize the unique markers on the cancer cells and target them effectively. This results in an immune response that is directed toward the cancer cells and only the cancer cells, destroying the cancer while leaving the rest of the body unharmed.

This type of cancer cell is comparatively large, growing up to 60 micrometers across, or slightly smaller than the width of a human hair. T cells are smaller, growing up to 10 micrometers across, or roughly 7.5 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Technique

This image was created using electron microscopy.