Teachable moment in classrooms:
- integumentary system chapter – location and function of melanocytes in skin
- lymphatic and immune system chapter – the role of T lymphocytes (T cells) in the immune defense reaction
- lymphatic and immune system chapter – mechanism of cell killing by cytotoxic T cells
The news item: Recently this report appeared online:
Patient is first treated with drug newly OK’d for melanoma
A Stanford Medicine melanoma patient is first in the nation to receive a cell-based therapy the FDA has approved for treating solid tumors.
The article informs us that a new therapy called “lificel” is being employed to treat patients with metastasized melanoma. The therapy includes removing a portion of the melanoma, extracting T cells from the tumor, stimulating the T cells to multiply into the millions, and infusing the new T cells into the patient.
So, Why Do I Care?? There are about 1.4 million people in the US alone living with melanoma, and the yearly new diagnosed cases are over 100,000. There are about 8,000 deaths from melanoma yearly. The metastasized stage of melanoma has a 5-year survival rate of about 20%. It is important to evaluate new therapies, because we want to increase the survival rate.
Plain English, Please!!! First, let’s talk about what metastasized melanoma is. Normally melanocytes reside in the epidermis layer of the skin where they produce the dark substance called melanin which protects the cells from UV light. When melanocytes start to divide uncontrollably, a cancer called melanoma forms. Melanomas have the tendency to release clumps of cancer cells, and those clumps spread through lymphatic vessels and grow into new cancer lump. Those new cancer lumps are called metastasis. Traditional chemotherapy drugs have been unable to kill off metastasized melanomas.
Second, let’s talk about how our immune system fights melanoma. Whenever cancer cells form, they produce modified proteins and sometimes new proteins,