PLAIN old household bleach might be the key to fighting some cancers, as the chemical seems to boost the efficacy of cancer vaccines. Cancers can develop when a patient's immune system is unable to recognise cancerous cells and kill them. Attempts have been made to prime such people's immune systems by giving them vaccines based on dead cancer cells. However, the results have been patchy, and seldom trigger immune responses strong enough to wipe out the cancer. Now Benny Chain and his colleagues at University College London have found that immune cells react much more strongly to the dead cancer cells if they have been killed with hypochlorous acid, the active compound in bleach. Immune cells taken from healthy volunteers were five times as likely to recognise dead ovarian cancer cells that had been killed with bleach, compared with cells that had been killed by heat or acid. Chain thinks that the immune system is geared to recognise cells killed in this way because many of our white blood cells destroy bacteria by producing microscopic quantities of a type of bleach. Once the bacteria are dead, other parts of the immune system probably become primed by the bleach-tainted detritus to recognise and fight subsequent infections by the same bugs. The team hopes to use this method to treat women with ovarian cancer. The idea is to extract white blood cells called dendritic cells from patients and grow them alongside laboratory lines of ovarian cancer cells killed with bleach. This should prime the dendritic cells to recognise ovarian cancer cells. The hope is that when the dendritic cells are injected back into the patient they will teach the rest of immune system to target ovarian cancer cells in the body (Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy, DOI: 10.1007/s00262-006-0127-9).
So, if we just change it slightly from 'drink a glass of bleach, asshole' to 'ooh! Have a little dash of bleach in that!', we can only be accused of being welcoming and well meaning? With the youth of today being so pampered and acutely over-sensitive, this might be the only way to increase the longevity of fugly.
