Immunopathy

Immunopathy

After hundreds of years of traversing diverse paths in search for a cure for human ailments, science has now accepted the postulate that only a man’s resistance power to fight the disease on his own can save him from falling sick. Efforts were initiated to find the means to do. It was during the research on fighting cancer that the researchers stumbled upon a method that may change the entire concept of treatment in future. Now this method is undergoing further tests and research, and the time is not far off when this method will be widely used to eradicate most of the diseases that beset mankind.

The renowned Greek philosopher and father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, was very near the truth, when five hundred years before Christ, he confidently declared, “The treatment of all diseases lies inside our own body.” For the last thirty years, hundreds of researches are being carried out all over the world to increase the fighting qualities of the human body so that it can effectively face them. Nothing startling or miraculous has come out of all these efforts, except that some new medicines for some diseases are discovered.

            It was by sheer luck that a team of doctors doing research in America’s National Cancer Research Institute, under the leadership of Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg stumbled upon a new discovery. They found that white cells of the blood have the capacity to destroy cancer forming tumors. The only hitch was that they had to be enriched by special diet so that they could effectively fight the elements that produce cancer cells in the body.

            You must be knowing that after AIDS, cancer is the most dreaded disease of the modern time. Nearly 450,000 people die of this disease every year in America alone. This is when that country has most sophisticated and advanced hospitals to treat this disease. You can imagine the conditions in less developed countries which are hardly in a position to treat patients suffering from cancer. That is why it is now treated as the number one killer disease in the world and efforts are being made in many countries to find some cure for it.

            There was a lot of excitement and an uproar as the news leaked out that the National Cancer Institute has been able to find a remedy for cancer. It became the most sensational news in newspapers, radio, and television. There was hope in the eyes of sufferers that now they could expect to live. Dr. Rosenberg repeatedly asserted that the whole thing was still under investigation, and it may take the time to confidently say that a cure has been found. Actually, he was sick of it, telling people that no responsibility could be taken of treating any cancer patient with the new discovery before it was found to be foolproof.

            Only a year before the new discovery made by Dr. Rosenberg, President Ronald Reagan of America had been operated upon with success for cancer of the intestines. Dr. Rosenberg had been working for a long time, on antibodies produced in the blood for fighting diseases. It was during these experiments that he felt that these white cells could be converted into defensive and offensive cells for fighting diseases after a special treatment. The most amazing thing was that there was no evil effect on the person from whose blood these cells were taken and re-administered into his body. Not only this, white cells could be taken out the blood of another person of the same blood group and used on some other person without any evil effects.

            Rosenberg was convinced in his mind that his discovery was the future therapy and named it Adoptive Immunotherapy. Later, other scientists called it Immunotherapy as they hoped that other diseases could also be treated by this method.

            In Immunotherapy, for the treatment of cancer, the white cells from the blood are extracted and kept in a test tube with a special chemical Interlukin-2 which has a high growth factor. These cells interact with this chemical and transform themselves into an absolutely new type of cells. Then these transformed and bigger cells are administered into the blood of the patient with the small quantity of Interlukin-2. The immediate reaction is that these cells start developing and spread themselves into all parts of the body and start finishing off the cancer cells.

            In the beginning, this experiment was conducted on 25 patients suffering from different types of cancer. There was a marked improvement in the condition of eleven patients but thirteen remained unaffected by the treatment. One patient was absolutely cured. Later on, it was found out that the blood of those patients, who were found unaffected by the treatment, had become very contaminated due widespread diffusion of cancer cells. In other words, cancer had spread beyond cure.

            The special feature of this method is that it can be unhesitatingly used for the treatment of cancer of any part of the body. Another factor in its favor is that this treatment increases the capacity of the body to fight cancer. The traditional method of treatment of cancer suffers from the defect that by the time it is detected that the patient has cancer, it is too late and the disease had spread its tentacles all over the body.in this method, one can hope to fight the disease at any level or stage. The scientists who are engaged in research in this field, are endeavoring to develop a vaccine for each blood group. Thus, healthy people could be inoculated against cancer as it is done in the case of smallpox and many such diseases. Research is also being carried out to develop vaccines for other diseases as well.

There is evidence that such efforts in this direction were made around 1890. Dr. William B. Coley of New York found that when bacteria of Streptococci class attacked a patient suffering from cancer of the neck, his cancer vastly improved. The research of Dr. Coley could not be further developed as that time research and investigations were being done on Radiotherapy.  

Interlukin-2Interlukin-2 was discovered for the last time in 1976. Dr. Robert C. Gallo produced it in National Cancer Institute. Later, Dr. Rosenberg discovered that this substance can be successfully used in the treatment of cancer with white blood cells. In the initial stages, a 29-year-old woman who was suffering from skin cancer and whose disease had reached last stages offered herself for experimentation. She was cured in such a miraculous manner that no trace of the disease remained on her skin though it had spread to all parts of her body. But, this treatment failed in many other cases. The researchers of medical science are now involved in finding out the reasons for this failure. 

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