Dr. Zhang Yu of the Oncology Department of the Third Hospital of Peking University revealed that the incident of "tumor treatment shady" has been twists and turns and continues to ferment. First, Dr. Zhang Yu posted that some doctors did not standardize the diagnosis and treatment, resulting in the lack of patients' personnel and wealth, and gave the example of a Qinghai patient Ma An example of a person who was recommended by a doctor in Shanghai to receive NK cell therapy, and then the article was forwarded by major media and attracted the attention of the National Health Commission, and an expert group was organized for review. However, Dr. Zhang Yu did not agree with this conclusion, and wrote that he hoped to have a public debate with the expert group in front of the media. At present, the National Health Commission has not responded.
Dr. Zhang Yu
The most controversial issue in the whole incident is whether NK cell therapy conforms to the standard of diagnosis and treatment, so what exactly is NK cell therapy? Is it still effective?
NK cells, also known as natural killer cells, are a special kind of immune cells. There are two kinds of receptors on its surface: one is an inhibitory receptor and the other is an activating receptor. As the name suggests, an inhibitory receptor is to inhibit it from killing cells. The activating receptor is to activate the cell-killing function . The ligands on the surface of normal cells are mostly bound to the inhibitory receptors, so that natural killer cells will not kill normal cells, and when the cells become cancerous, the cells The ligands on the surface are changed, so the ability to inhibit the killing of NK cells is lost, and even the killer cells are actively activated, resulting in the killing of cancer cells by NK cells.
Immune cells
It is easy to understand that NK cells have a "face recognition system", and when normal cells become cancerous, they will be killed because they cannot pass the "face recognition system".
Face recognition
But it should be noted that this kind of "recognition" is limited, not all cancer cells will be recognized, and the number of NK cells themselves is also limited, cancer It is impossible to recognize after it has progressed to a certain point. All cancer cells are killed, so the function of NK cells also has great limitations of and .
And NK cell therapy is an attempt to treat by increasing the number of NK cells or activating the killing function of NK cells. Injected into the body, trying to treat tumors by increasing the number of NK cells.
Although this kind of NK cell therapy is very good in theory, the results obtained in practical experiments are not ideal. Only some cases have achieved good therapeutic effects. Most of the experiments receiving NK cell therapy did not obtain ideal data. For the Qinghai patient Ma, this treatment method also did not play any role, which also shows the limitations of this treatment method.
Although scientists are also looking for the reasons and improving the existing NK cell therapy technology, there has been no breakthrough progress so far, so NK cell therapy is still a treatment method under exploration, not a mature treatment technology. In the ideal, it is a magical treatment technique, but the ideal has not been reflected in reality. This treatment method has many flaws, so it is really necessary to make people doubt its motives as a commercial treatment method.
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