What kind of information will be made available by The Cancer Gen...

Question

What kind of information will be made available by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)? What sort of role do you think TCGA information will play in cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment in the future?

Accepted Answer

Welcome back, everyone. Let's look at this next question. It says cancer cells avoid the immune system by choice. A killing all the immune cells B proliferating highly. C lying dormant for many years or d changing the characteristics of different immune cells within the tumor. Well, this is an example of a question where it might be easier to eliminate answers because several of them are quite obviously incorrect. When we look at choice. A cancer cells do not kill all the immune cells in the body. The immune cells are still there. They're just not effective in attacking and rec recognizing and attacking the cancer cells. So we can cross off choice. A choice. B proliferating highly cancer cells do proliferate highly. But that uh doesn't avoid the immune system. That's just a characteristic of what cancer cells do. So not our answer. Choice. And in choice C lying dormant for many years, there can be sort of precancerous changes that cause cancers not to develop right away, but this isn't their mechanism for avoiding the immune system. So choice C is not our answer. So we're left with choice D which is changing the characteristics of different immune cells within the tumor. And this is the correct answer. There's multiple methods here. Um cancer cells can actually synthesize molecules that bind T cells and suppress their activity. Uh in terms of changing T cells, they can also, they can produce tumor associated regulatory T cells that actually repress activated T cell activity. So they interfere actively with T cells that might otherwise attack them. And finally, in addition, they have abnormal expression of MH C molecules, those major histocompatibility complex, which are the ones that stimulate the antigen presenting cells and that prevents T cells from recognizing and attacking them. So they have multiple mechanisms uh by which they alter the characteristics of immune cells within the tumor and prevent that full activity of the immune system that might otherwise get rid of them. So choice D is our correct answer in describing the ways cancer cells avoid the immune system by changing the characteristics of different immune cells within the tumor. See you in the next video.

What kind of information will be made available by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)? What sort of role do you think TCGA information will play in cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment in the future?

Key Concepts

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)

Genomic Data in Cancer Diagnosis

Personalized Medicine

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