Disruption of immune-system pathway key step in cancer progression

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 - 08:21 in Health & Medicine

Human immune cells communicate constantly with one another as they coordinate to fight off infection and other threats. Now researchers at Stanford University's School of Medicine have shown that muffling a key voice in this conversational patter is an early step in the progression of human cancers. Silencing an inter-cell signalling mechanism called the interferon pathway may be one way newly developing cancers gain the upper hand. It may also explain the immune dysfunctions seen in many cancer patients and why cancer immunotherapies are often ineffective...

Read the whole article on

More from

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net