【转载】你对癌症具有免疫力吗？(图)

 Seven years ago, biochemist Zheng Cui of Wake Forest University was conducting a routine experiment, injecting test mice with a strain of cancer cells so aggressive it caused a 100 percent death rate. Oddly, one of the mice wouldn’t die. Thinking he had made an error, Cui injected the mouse with a million times the lethal dose, but it still lived.

 七年前，威克森林大学的生物化学家崔政正在进行一个常规的试验：他给试验鼠注射一种攻击性很强的癌细胞，致死率100%。奇怪的是，其中一只老鼠并没有死亡。崔政以为注射有误，便再次为其注射了多倍于致命剂量的癌细胞，可是，它仍然活着。

 Cui was intrigued. He bred the mouse and found that 40 percent of its offspring share a remarkable resistance to many forms of cancer. When the animals’ immune systems identify a cancer cell, a genetic tweak allows their bodies to launch a massive attack of white blood cells that kills the budding tumor.

 这激起了崔政的兴趣。他饲养了这只老鼠，发现它40%的后代继承了对多种癌症的奇特抵抗力。当这些老鼠的免疫系统识别出癌细胞时，一种肿瘤坏死因子基因就会使它们体内的白细胞发起大规模的进攻，消灭处于萌芽状态的肿瘤。

 Now Cui and his colleagues have found a clue that may point the way to an actual cure. When they inject white blood cells from any of these anticancer mice into their nonresistant brethren, the injected animals become resistant as well, fighting off induced cancer in a matter of weeks or avoiding it entirely.

  现在，崔政和他的同事们发现了一条线索，有望通向临床治疗。当他们从任何抗癌鼠身上提取出白细胞，注射到不具抵抗力的老鼠身上时，接受注射的老鼠也变得有了抵抗力，在几周之内就能击退或完全摆脱诱发性癌症。

 Even more promising, Cui has sampled a group of human volunteers and found that 10 to 15 percent have similar super cancer-fighting white blood cells. That could explain why some people never get cancer and why others’ tumors spontaneously regress. Cui proposes injecting these people’s white blood cells into cancer patients to see if he can transfer their immunity.

 更有希望的是，崔政对一群志愿者进行取样检验，发现10-15%的人们具有同样的超级抗癌白细胞。这说明了为什么有些人从不患癌症，而另外一些人的肿瘤为什么能够自行消退。崔政建议将这些人的白细胞注射到癌症患者身上，看看能否改变他们的免疫系统。

 

  Other, more established oncologists point out that Cui’s mice are genetically uniform; humans, with their distinct DNA differences, would run a deadly risk of the donated cells attacking their host, even if they aren’t rejected first. Cui counters that these issues could be overcome, as they have been for other types of transplants. “All the delivery mechanisms are in place,” he says. “We truly believe that this is a viable approach.”

 其他较有地位的肿瘤专家指出，崔政的老鼠在基因上是一致的，而人类的脱氧核糖核酸是明显不同的，即使起初注入细胞并不受到排斥，但它们对主体细胞的攻击会造成致命的危险。崔政反驳说，就象其他类型的器官移植一样，这些问题是可以克服的。“所有的传输装置均已到位，”他说，“我们确实相信，这是一条可行的途径。”