The fact that immune function is worse in older people is standard knowledge and johnswentworth wrote a post about the thesis that the thymus might be a central factor here.
The fact that cancers have to mutate to activate telomerase production to be able to constantly replicate seems to me like a cancer 101 thing. There might be some cancers that happen in stem cells that actually produce telomerase naturally but it’s necessary for normal cells.
A decade ago, cancer vaccines were targeting single targets and usually proteins that are developed in the fetus but not in adults. The personalized cancer vaccines currently in development are about sequencing the cancers of a patient and then creating vaccine’s to targets a bunch of different mutations. I got that knowledge from an explanation about cancer vaccines.
This process of antigen presentation is done by MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex)-molecules.
Lastly, as complete abrogation of antigen presentation can lead to natural killer (NK) cell-mediated tumour killing, we also discuss how tumours can harbour antigen presentation defects and still evade NK cell recognition.
Here it seems that it’s possible for a cancer to mutate in a way where it has some antigen presentation defects and still avoid NK cell recognition but it doesn’t seem to be the standard case.
One distinguishing factor of cancer cells is that they either have to present antigens of their mutations on their cell walls or fail to present some antigens that normal cells present on their cell wall.
Given cancer patients NK cells is one way of cancer immunotherapy that’s currently studied. There’s recent research on artifical NK cells.
There’s the general issue of biology usually being complex and there being a lot of unknowns, so when I say it’s plausible that reduced immune function is the most important reason for more cancers in old people, I’m not claiming that we currently have evidence for that thesis but that what we know is compatible with the thesis.
What I wrote isn’t very original.
The fact that immune function is worse in older people is standard knowledge and johnswentworth wrote a post about the thesis that the thymus might be a central factor here.
The fact that cancers have to mutate to activate telomerase production to be able to constantly replicate seems to me like a cancer 101 thing. There might be some cancers that happen in stem cells that actually produce telomerase naturally but it’s necessary for normal cells.
A decade ago, cancer vaccines were targeting single targets and usually proteins that are developed in the fetus but not in adults. The personalized cancer vaccines currently in development are about sequencing the cancers of a patient and then creating vaccine’s to targets a bunch of different mutations. I got that knowledge from an explanation about cancer vaccines.
This process of antigen presentation is done by MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex)-molecules.
Searching a bit gives me https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33750922/ for the thesis about complete stop of antigen presentation:
Here it seems that it’s possible for a cancer to mutate in a way where it has some antigen presentation defects and still avoid NK cell recognition but it doesn’t seem to be the standard case.
One distinguishing factor of cancer cells is that they either have to present antigens of their mutations on their cell walls or fail to present some antigens that normal cells present on their cell wall.
Given cancer patients NK cells is one way of cancer immunotherapy that’s currently studied. There’s recent research on artifical NK cells.
There’s the general issue of biology usually being complex and there being a lot of unknowns, so when I say it’s plausible that reduced immune function is the most important reason for more cancers in old people, I’m not claiming that we currently have evidence for that thesis but that what we know is compatible with the thesis.