Leave. Find.
Take it apart.
The lymph node has produced hundreds of thousands of killer T cells. But building an army and delivering it are different problems.
These 20 lessons follow that cell to the tumour, and then through the dismantling of a single cell — swapping the compass, chemokine navigation, the four steps out of a vessel, the scissors that cut through stroma, target recognition, the killer synapse and aiming, the perforin ring, the caspase cascade, the point of no return, a quiet death. Python runs right inside this page.
How you'll learn
An army that never arrives is no army. This is where immunotherapy most often fails — lessons 1-8 are that road.
The cell that grew because of a mutation becomes a target because of that same mutation. What it makes gets cut; what gets cut gets displayed.
The self-destruct device is already inside the target. All granzyme B does is make one cut. That is why it is fast.
A cell that bursts causes inflammation — dangerous when a tumour collapses at once. Instead it is bagged up and collected.