A person’s immune system is able to fight off many diseases, but it tends to be ineffective against cancer because of a mechanism called immune tolerance, or the inability to identify “which cells to attack.”
As a press release issued by PLOS states, a new study led by Dartmouth has “identified which parasite proteins and which immunological pathways are required to break [this] immune tolerance.” The team decided to focus on a strain of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, or T. Gondii, which has been shown to “cure mice of several types of solid tumors.”
