CANCER BUSTED Macrophages finally find Cancerous Cells hiding in plain sight

People pictured the future a lot different than it is today. We would have had flying cars and a room that could wash, dress, and do your hair in under 5 minutes by just pressing a few buttons. Well we might have to wait a little longer for that because scientists are still a little busy trying offer us cures to every disease that can potentially kill us rather than having fun being Willy Wonka. But why are there so many cures and which of them are actually not a mith? Of course we are talking about cancer here, the umpredictable disease that can kill you in one month, torture you 10 years or just leave you alone. You just might say it has a mind of its own.

I was reading earlier today an article on the Daily Mail about how raw garlic reduces the risk of pulmonary cancer to half, or so the Chinese say in a clinical study they conducted. Then I remebered reading another similar article about some chemicals in grapefruit that could help you fight breast cancer. Of course tese aren't the only ones I've read about how things in our day by day lives can lower the risk of certain diseases.What they are not telling you in all these studies is that the majority of them are based on closely monitoring a group of individuals and not on actual lab testing. I am not against eating garlic and grapefruit of course, they are very nutritious and actually quite tasty but not as tasty as a dose of antibodies that are actually trying to stop cancer AFTER it occured. 

I say occured because nobody knows exactly why cancer apperas. It just kinda shows up starts growing all over the place. To stop it from appearing out of the blue they tell us to eat garlic, grapefruit, lillies and the blossoms of a rare plant that only grows in the North of Switzerland but it only helps you if you boil its petals in sheep blood. Even if I do all these things and even if they supposedly work on me, what about the other thousands of people that happen to have it anyway? Will garlic help them? No. 

Medicinal Marijuana could help you prevent lung cancer and even treat it by giving you will power and by eliminating the nausea that comes with chimotherapy. Chimotherapy is the bag of chemicals that makes you regret you didn't eat all that garlic when you had the chance but nevertheless it can help you kill cancer. Or maybe THESE awesome people that didn't treat cancer like a vampire and actually did something about it can help you. If you are thinking "this can't be, cancer can't be so easily treatable, why didn't they think of this before", I might be abe to give you an answer:

Researchers have tried to find antigens on cancerous cells. These antigens should allow your immune system to distinguish them from your normal cells. Your immune cells are programmed to fight off some types of antigens and some not. In the case it can't fight some antigens it should, reasearchers can add a gene to those cells that helps them detect the antigen you want them to, develop a culture from the modified cells and then shove them back into your bloodstream. Yes, your body can have updates now. BUT cancer cells overproduce certain antigens your immune system shouldn't respond to because those certain antigens are produced by lower levels of healthy cells too. So that was the biggest problem at first. 

Now let's discuss the CD-47 protein. CD-47 is found on the surface of many cells in your body. It tells circulating immune cells caled macrophages not to eat these cells. Unfortunately cells that should be destroyed are not, and these are of course the cancerous cells that have large amounts of the CD-47 protein on the cell surface. The researchers wanted to find out if the CD-47 protein could be a therapeuic antibody target. They used anti CD-47 antibodies that cling to the CD-47 not letting it bind to its receptor on macrophages, therefore it cannot send its "do not eat me" signal. Of course there is a tiny little problem with this idea. You can inject the anti CD-47 antibody and it will attack the cancerous cells but how do you keep it from affecting the other healthy cells that contain CD-47? Well you don't. The canerous cells have so much CD-47 so they ca remain hidden that the antibodies don't notice that much other cells. You might say it's just like love at first sight. There are of course some decreases in cell counts but nothing the body can't manage. The potential for toxicity is slightly higher comparing them with controlled antibodies but the results are way better!

To sum up, we can recognise the effectiveness of the anti CD-47 antybody because it busts the cover of the villain and the cops-macrophages can bust them unlike controlled antibodies that are more chaotic because they are the lymphocytes (another type of immune cells) that attack the cacerous cells and they cannot be so specific because they have to find flags that are not easily detectable.

Well, these being said, if garlic and holy water don't do the trick you can just thank these guys for giving you an alternative:

The story of Abby and Brittany Hensel, a medical mistery

Abby and Brittany were born a little bit different than us. The story about the two girls held together for life by flesh isn't a new one. Born as conjoined twins, they shared one body. This is a very rare phenomenon and the chanches of surviving the first 24 hour of their lives were 1 in 30 milion. But sometimes nature decides to give us a surprise and the twins did indeed survive not only the first 24 hour of their lives but a full childhood and adolescence.

There were many articles about Abbigalil and Brittany in their early childhood. They parents were very protectie so few pictures were taken and little was known about the natural improbability that actually happened. After a more or less normal infancy the girls were ready to show their story to the world. A documentary was made and after that they had their very own reality show named "Joined for life", and joined for life indeed they were, but the question we will probabily never have an answer to is how? 

How can these girls be what they are today? These are the questions many phisicians have posed since Abby and Brit were born. Parents didn't want us to know or to understand how,so we can only speculate on the complex anatomy that glued these two people together into one conjoined life. 

In the picture you can see that their unique body has two hearts and two sets of lungs in one rib cage. The cariovascular system of their body is astoneshing. There is no mammal on this planet that has something like that. How do their hearts work? Do they have one aorta that splits to both hearts, do they have two that fuse at some point? Are the limbs and the heads irigated by the heart on their side or do the hearts work together? What happens if one heart stops? Not only we do not know the answers of these questions but more importantly we cannot understand if they are two or one.

One of the most interesting things about their individuality is that each girl controls the arm and leg on her side of the body and they cannot feel the other's side. Despite these aspects the twins can synchronize their movements extremely well and they developed a complex psychological bond that allows them to finish each other's sentences. While writing an e-mail with both hands there is little comunication between the girls. Brittany admits "While we're YM-ing or writing e-mails we normally say -I am- not -we are-, I don't know why". Scientists all over the world are eager to determine through brain and nervous sistem imaging techniques their sense of space and movement, how do they react to the other's gestures. These things are now possible with brain scans that detect subtle alterations in the blood flow or in the brain metabolism but the parents and the girls don't want their lives to be anything than normal. 

But what actually is normal with these girls? Doctors say these special nervous connections that allow them to be so in sync with each other have occured very early after conception. The nervous system will have been developing only a few weeks later and this specific one involved connections that don't normally occur in normal people. You can't have motor fibers going down one spine and up the other, at least we shouldn't be able to. Each normal brain has two hemispheres, a right one and a left one and each hepisphere controls the opposite side of the body. These girls have only one body and normally four hemispheres so how does that work? Being a huge fan of speculation myself, I would say that even if they cannot feel the others touch, there are more complex spacial maps in their brains that allow them to know where the other limb is situated. 

I think that some of you may be familiar with the term Phantom Limb syndrome. The Phantom Limb sindrome is the sensation 60 to 80 % of amputee pacients feel after having one limb removed. The sensation is often as if the missing limb is still there and it may cause severe frustration to the individual and pain where the leg should have been. First scientists tought that the pain was caused by the nerve endings that were severed in the surgery and were sending signals that the brain interpreted as pain. Surgeons usually operated again to cut and remove the severed inflamated nerve endings but it only made it worse.

Ronald Melzack wrote that the experience of the body is made by a wide network of interconnecting neural structures. Tim Pons and his coleagues from the National Institute of Health showed that the primary somatosensory cortex undergoes massive reorganisation after loss of sensory imput. To make it simpler, the wires get mixed up in your head and the brain doesn't know which are which so you feel strokes that are on other parts of your body on your missing limb like it's still there.

I told you that part to help you uderstand my speculation. Even if their brains are wired differently than ours, the major rules that make us work still apply to them. So if the somatosensory cortex is in charge with all the information nerves send from the body to the brain, after Abby and Brittany were conceived and the nervous system started to form, each of their brains adapted to only one side but each somatosensory cortex (situated in the postcentral gyrus of each brain) received imput from both sides therefore giving the girls the possibility of having almost the coorination of a normal human being.

We also have to understand that they have grown up together and although they had two heads, they did the work of one human. Even if each mind can think for itself they were constructed to also think for each other. Indeed their individuality was affected but their quality of life is much greater by not separating them. We will always wonder how can they be the way they are and we can always speculate but maybe one day this medical mistery will be solved and we will understand how they ca be at the same time two people and one.

Thenk you for reading. The information for this post was taken form Wikipedia and the documentary "The Twins who Share a Body-My shocking story"