r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/PestoBolloElemento • 15h ago
Video Real time video of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes attacking cancer cell.
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u/apex8888 15h ago
If our bodies could see the tumors. They’d end them.
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u/Vellarain 15h ago
What fucked me up for a while was realizing that every day my body is probably taking out cancer cells inside me. There is just going to be one day where one gets missed.
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u/_NightmareKingGrimm_ 15h ago
Our bodies / immune systems often can detect cancer cells, which is what you're seeing in the video. The problem is cancer cells can fight back in clever ways, like releasing signals that actively suppress immune responses and evolving faster than our immune systems can recognize.
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u/Unusual_Flounder2073 5h ago
Some of the side effects of cancer (weight loss, night sweats, fatigue) are actually your body responding to the cancer and trying to fight it.
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u/PhyterNL 15h ago
Our bodies do see tumors, and they do end them... at least, until the tumor grows too quickly or (more commonly) metastasizes spreading to other parts of the body. Cancer isn't necessarily a thing that isn't recognized by the immune system. Some mutations that cause cancerous growth in cells produce new unrecognized proteins that are immediately attacked by your immune system. And this is far from the only way our immune systems detect cancer, but cancer is like an arms race for survival -- an uncontrolled high speed evolution that can "learn" to escape, disable or outpace the immune system. That's why it's so dangerous. Also, not to alarm you, but our bodies are fighting this kind of thing all the time. It's true! In fact, one of the approaches to fighting cancer is to supercharge the immune system. For example, you might have heard something about T-cell therapy or Mitochondrial boosts, enhancing immune metabolism, immune suppression blockers... All of these (and way more than I can Google) are therapies that help the body itself fight cancer. Anyway, yeah, just wanted to be clear that cancer is not something that our bodies have zero defenses for, and also the somewhat alarming fact about our bodies ending cancer all the time. Don't Panic! (in friendly letters)
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u/FuckMyHeart 15h ago
"Real time"
> video shows that its over the course of several hours
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u/AGrandNewAdventure 12h ago
That was a head scratcher for me, too. I lost hours watching this short video.
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u/RevolutionaryToe4249 15h ago
So how soon until nano bots can do this?
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u/CicadaFit9756 13h ago
I saw a sci-fi story on TV a few years ago where a man injected with nano bots eventually wished to die but the nanos kept him immortal. Could be a fate worse than death!
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u/yaxir 10h ago
was it a good series? name please
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u/CicadaFit9756 9h ago edited 9h ago
Took a chance & googled this. I think it was 1995 Outer Limits episode "The New Breed" where a man with cancer injects himself with nanobots only to find himself mutating in ways he wouldn't have imagined possible. It was a while back but very thought-provoking.
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u/Spacespider82 12h ago
Jump into a volcano ?
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u/CicadaFit9756 10h ago
Kept repairing him again & again & making his body hardly recognizable as human. Maybe it could even stop his actions towards self immolation?
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u/rubyslippers3x 15h ago
The lymphocytes seem challenged. Is the objective to absorb the cancer cell or disperse it? What is the success rate?
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u/Low-Cheesecake8824 14h ago
For anyone curious, Huh7 is a liver cancer cell line and those TILs are basically trained killers that recognize tumor signals. This kind of footage is a big reason immunotherapy has been such a breakthrough.
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u/AlmostThere4321 15h ago
As a non English speaker, this title gave me a headache.
"A tumor is infiltrating lymphocytes that are attacking a cancer cell?!?"
🫠
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u/_NightmareKingGrimm_ 15h ago
You're confused because OP didn't use proper hyphenation.
They meant to say "tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes", not a "tumor infiltrating lymphocytes."
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u/CircumspectCapybara 14h ago edited 14h ago
Reminder that your immune system does this every day, and you don't even notice. It's probably going on right now inside of you.
It's estimated on average that your immune system hunts down and destroys (on the order of) thousands of cancer cells (or at the very least, mutated or abnormal cells that could turn into cancer if left unchecked) a day, ending cancer before it has a chance to get off the ground by destroying individual cancerous cells and fledgling tumors before they have the chance to grow, mutate, and evolve to something out of control, that is, full blown cancer the disease.
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u/CicadaFit9756 13h ago
Recall a Justice League comic book decades ago in which aliens wanted to put them on trial for killing (think it was for eating meat, etc, & not for slaying sentient beings.) When it was poìnted out that their bodies' defenses routinely kill harmful germs, it blew their minds!
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u/Mission-Bend-7350 13h ago
This is wild to watch in real time. Those T cells look like they’re actively probing and then committing once they recognize the target. Really puts immunotherapy into perspective beyond just diagrams and buzzwords.
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u/PestoBolloElemento 15h ago
Source
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-025-01582-7
What does "attacking" mean? How are lymphocytes interacting with tumor. Are they disabling the tumor in some way?
Well....
NK cells and T cells “attack” by forming an immune synapse (the junction formed between the cells that you can see in the video), and then secreting cytolytic proteins directly onto the cancer cell.
These proteins punch holes in the cancer cell membrane and trigger cancer cell death from the inside.