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How Does the Immune System Protect Us from Cancer?

How Does the Immune System Protect Us from Cancer? (0:50)

Cancer cells reside in all of us, and our immune systems work to attack them; natural killer (NK) cells do that via a process called apoptosis. Watch oncology researcher Kelly Turner, PhD, explain how our immune systems protect us from cancer.

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What many people don't realize about the immune system and cancer is that we all have cancer cells in our bodies, every single day anywhere from 400 to more. Cancer cells are produced in your body every day and there's simply bad copies, and your immune system knows this and takes care of them without a problem.

And so when cancer develops over time that could be because something is wrong with your immune system or it could be that cancer is just really good at chemically hiding from your immune system. But the point is, is that if we can just get your immune system to see the cancer it knows how to take care of it, and the immune cell that we're looking at in particular, is the Natural Killer cell, the NK Cell, and this has the ability to literally go to find a cancer cell, surround it and pop it in a process called apoptosis.