Scientists identify pathway activated by interferon-gamma leading to tumor death | Hacker News Reader

Scientists identify pathway activated by interferon-gamma leading to tumor death

medicalxpress.com

96 pointswglb12 comments

This is pretty cool. Understanding the downstream components of the pathway will be critical for developing a more targeted therapeutic approach. IFN-gamma is a cytokine - a signaling molecule that turns on your inflammatory / immune response. That is a pretty heavy hammer.

Cytokine just means cell signalling molecule

Cyto - cell, kine - movement

and covers a broad range of molecules, but generally excludes hormones and growth factors.

They are not exclusively to immune modulation, there are many other types too.

I mean… you’re not wrong. That is the strict ontological definition.

But like 99% of the time someone mentions cytokines in an actual conversation they are taking about inflammatory / immune signaling.[1]

Immune cells are far and away the largest class of circulating motile cells, no?

1. https://testdirectory.questdiagnostics.com/test/test-detail/...

Yeah, just to add some handy distinguishing words: Denotation vs. Connotation.

Note that it isn't quite the same as literal vs figurative, since nobody's talking about metaphorical or poetic molecules.

______

With love perfuse, pen to paper,

It shall diffuse, sweet as vapor,

Take this letter, mine to thine,

There is no better Cytokine

lovely

Can someone provide some sort of overview as to how these sort of pathways, or on a even more detailed level, specific protein receptors for certain diseases, are identified?

I'm not qualified to properly respond but I've accepted what Michael Levin says about what cancer is, basically when cells become 'deaf' to the tissues around them which would normally either (by 'telling' them) make a cell behave as one of these cells should, or end up destroying the invader. Cancer cells ignore the message and behave like single -celled organisms instead. Cancer doesn't have just one component that can be detected by testing though, multiple different signalling and communication mechanisms all have to be broken at once. There's many paths that can lead to it and it's overall extremely varied as a disease iiuc.

Identifying these pathways would probably be by genetic sequencing, protein folding/behaviour analysis and extensive in-test-tube experimentation with living cell cultures.. but I'm not in the field so I don't really know. Maybe there's a voktage-gradient-memory-based (see Michael Levin's work) way to detect this type of misbehavior too? That'd be really cool!

That’s amazing, can’t wait to see new therapeutics developed off this finding.

Only for the wealthy that have doctors that are up to date with the latest treatments. The rest of us will get the run of the mill chemo therapy.

Wont they test it on us poor folks first ?

Original: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10557262/

iirc interferon gamma is a cool sounding name but what it does is more esoteric than say interferon alpha or beta, which more directly activate immune response at the site of release.

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