Bowel cancer mystery solved by Glasgow scientists

A mystery which has stumped bowel cancer researchers for decades, has been solved by scientists at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute and University of Glasgow. A mystery which has stumped bowel cancer researchers for decades, has been solved by scientists at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute and University of Glasgow. Generations of doctors and researchers have struggled to understand why a bowel cancer patient's immune system ignores the cancer, rather than attack it. Now, the Cancer Research UK-funded team in Glasgow, also funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome, believe they know how bowel cancer "blinds" the immune system so it can't see the cancer and is therefore unable to destroy it. The discovery, published in Cancer Immunology Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, opens the door to potentially reversing or preventing this process, which would allow the immune system to "see" the bowel cancer cells and stop them from growing and multiplying. Dr Seth Coffelt of the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute and University of Glasgow, who led the research, said: "Normally immune cells keep things as they should be, patrolling the bowel like security guards, tackling any harmful bacteria, and keeping the gut healthy. "However, when cells in the bowel become cancerous, they fire these "security guards" and all the methods these immune cells use to talk to each other to coordinate an immune response no longer get produced.