“Cancer” is ranked No. 1 among words that patients do not want to hear from doctors’ mouths, according to a survey. In general, patients who are diagnosed with malignant tumors are sentenced to death. They not only need to go through painful chemotherapy, but their family will incur costly treatment expense with an uncertain result.
Therefore, almost every Chinese student would purchase international student insurance (aka 留学生 保险) and F-2 insurance (aka f2保险) for their spouses/children when studying abroad. After graduation, they will consider to purchase OPT insurance (aka opt 保险) and H-1B insurance (aka h1b 保险).
Some students choose to waive American university insurance (aka waive 美国大学保险). Tim Liao, an MBA graduate from Cambridge, MA said, “I had a benign tumor in 2014, three months after my graduation from Harvard. Luckily, my condition was not bad, and my health insurance for OPT (aka opt期间保险) covered majority of my surgery and post-surgery service. In fact, having health insurance did not secure the insured person from any type of cancer. Bad living habits — staying up, smoking, overdrinking, etc. — are the keys to unlock the gate of cancer.” The advancement in medical technology is the core.
Chinese scientists developed a combined tumor-killing therapy that can be activated specifically at tumor sites in mouse models of cancer, which is more effective than previous similar therapies. The study published on Friday in the journal Science Immunology described the new cancer immunotherapy that can prevent the immune system from becoming tolerant of tumors, which occurs in 30 percent of all cancer patients.
A team led by Wang Dangge from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fudan University developed a common immune checkpoint inhibitor in a nanoparticle formulation, which is highly tumor-specific. The checkpoint inhibitor is a kind of increasingly popular anti-tumor drug. It can block proteins that keep immune T cells from killing cancer. But the checkpoint inhibitor used to target those immune system-suppressing proteins like PD-1 and PD-L1 often fails to reach deep-seated or metastatic tumors.
Wang’s team combined the nanoparticles carrying PD-L1-targeting antibodies with a light-activated molecule. The molecule called photosensitizer can produce tumor-killing reactive oxygen species after encountering a protein abundant in tumors, according to the study.
In mouse models, a local near-infrared radiation that activates the photosensitizer, along with the administration of antibodies-carrying nanoparticles, promoted the infiltration of cancer cell-killing T cells into the tumor site and made the tumors more sensitive to the checkpoint blockade.
This combination also helped the nanoparticles effectively suppress tumor growth and metastasis to the lung and lymph nodes, resulting in approximately 80 percent mouse survival over 70 days, compared to complete mouse death in 45 days in the group treated with only PD-L1 antibodies, according to the study.
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