Julie Goldenberg is a journalist based in New York City. She was a former associate editor at AARP where she reported on aging in America. Her work has appeared in AARP the Magazine, AARP.org, and Forbes.
Immune cells produced during a severe COVID-19 infection may cause cancerous tumors to shrink, research in mice suggests.
"They essentially form like a castle around the cancer cells, protecting them from being invaded by the body's immune system," Bharat told Live Science. So they analyzed blood samples from people who had had a bout of severe COVID-19 and found that monocytes produced after severe infection retained a special receptor that bound well to a specific sequence of COVID-19 RNA.
The researchers also looked at mice with different types of Stage 4 cancer tumors — melanoma, lung, breast and colon cancer. The mice were given a drug to induce the monocytes and thus mimic the immune response to COVID-19 infection. The tumors shrank for the four types of cancer studied. Bharat thinks the mechanism may work in humans and against other types of cancer as well since it disrupts a way most cancers spread throughout the body."By activating this pathway, we precondition the monocytes to never become the cancer-friendly cells," Bharat said.
While immunotherapy works roughly 20% to 40% of the time, it can fail if the body can't produce enough functioning T cells, which destroy cancer cells, said Dr. Yibin Kang, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, who was not involved in the study. For instance, a 2021 study in the British Journal of Cancer found that less than 15% of cancer patients saw an"effective anti-cancer immune response" from immunotherapy drugs alone.
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