The “Vaccine” for Cancer Ablation
One of the keys to having successful immunotherapy is to leave the tumor destroyed in the body, in this way the immune system can collect information about cancer and thus fight it more effectively.
The combination of micro ablation and immunotherapy works well to treat cancer in advanced stages. Similarly, this combination is increasingly being considered to treat cancer in its early stages, especially in cases of breast, lung, and liver cancer. Ablation is considered the future substitute for surgery.
In the same way, it is expected that cryoablation will be used more frequently for cancer in its early stages and in turn complemented with measures that improve the immune response to reduce the risk of future metastasis.
When cancer progresses beyond its early stage, it becomes systemic cancer, and it can spread throughout the body. After the primary tumors are removed by surgery, patients are usually told that cancer has been completely removed. However, this is not entirely true, even if the primary tumor is removed, cancer cells remain in the body, so they can proliferate and form new tumors. In advanced cancer cases, when a tumor is ablated, the dead cancer cells act like a vaccine, prompting the immune system to attack foreign bodies including cancer cells that may remain in the body. Nevertheless, this does not happen with recurrence without the help of some type of immunotherapy.
Very few doctors realize that cryoablation can be used to generate a powerful immune response, and is considered one of the most successful cancer treatments out there, particularly in patients with stage III or IV cancer, where treatment options are much more limited. Each year approximately 600,000 cases of advanced cancer are diagnosed in the United States. However, using ablation, combined with immunotherapy, there is the potential to save many lives; avoiding patients from having to go through chemotherapy and radiation. You might consider calling this combination AblationVax
therapy because of the way it optimizes the body’s immune system, like how vaccines work.
Medicine today is very focused on profitability, so there is very little motivation for an oncologist to promote cryoablation and immunotherapy (AblationVax) for their patients, plus most cancer patients are uninformed about the achievements that have been made.
Ablation kills tumors in the body and leaves behind dead fragments, known as antigens, their function is to help the immune system recognize tumors; they provide information to the immune cells and thus to know the process they must follow to find the harmful cells. In addition, the ablation initiates an inflammatory process that also stimulates the immune system, this is known as “Danger Signals”. These signals allow immune cells to locate where they need to initiate a counterattack against harmful organisms. In fact, related to immunity, ablation can be quite an effective boost to the body’s general anti-cancer immune response. Another great advantage of ablation is the reduction of tumor mass, so that immunotherapy and the immune response against cancer have a weaker opponent to attack, by reducing the size of the tumor, the patient theoretically has a better chance of immunotherapy works.
Reference:
Williams, J. (2019, 15th October) The Immunotherapy Revolution. (pp. 40-50)
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