Fighting cancer with Dendritic Cells

Hi, I’m Dr. Branyon with New Hope Unlimited. Thanks for joining me again, I appreciate that. Today I wanted to talk about another one of my favorite cancer fighting immune system cells. And that’s going to be the dendritic cells. So welcome aboard. Back in the 1970s, a man named Ralph Steinman, you may have heard about him, he actually won the Nobel Prize in 2011 for distinguishing the dendritic cells, and naming them in the mid 1970s, geez, there, I’m older than they are named anyway. So science presents every day, something new. That’s why I love to watch and keep up with the research and the science. But the dendritic cells are kind of, they call them the professional antigen presenting cell. Now, let me kind of explain that, let’s say there’s a professional Realtor who has all the licensure and everything to work, and someone decides they’re looking for a house to buy. So they call up the realtor and say, I want this type of house and see if you can find me one. So the realtor gets busy, she or he goes out and and they’re roaming the neighborhoods and looking on the computer. Oops, they found one that they think might work for that buyer. So they take the house, the plans, all the info on it, and they present it to possible buyer, buyer possible buyer looks at and says, Oh, yeah, that’s it. So the rent realtor has found presented it, and the buyer bought it, the buyer chose to buy it, move in it, remodeled it, resell it, or either just knock it down and build in the same spot, whatever. But that’s kind of the same thing that the professional dendritic cell does, it is going out into the neighborhood, the bloodstream, looking for that cancer cell into present it to the T and B cells

Okay, now let’s back up a little bit, so I can explain it a little bit better. Now, I’m going to use it like is all of my videos, instead of using the big science words that the researchers would use, I like bringing it down to where we can understand it and use the imagination. Because if you don’t know what you’re fighting, because it’s invisible. And if you don’t know how we can fight it, it’s hard to get well, so I like to give it to you in ways that you can figure it out, or at least try to figure it out. Well, the dendritic cells are good at finding and presenting the cancer cell antigens to those T and B cells. Now remember, in the other videos, I explained that all cancer cells will get what they call tumor surface antigens. Antigens are bad. You don’t want the antigens. There’s all kinds of antigens. But we’ll right now we’re just being talking specifically about the tumor surface cancer antigens. Once again, it depends on the cancer, the person’s, the person’s own DNA, lots of different things. We’ll talk about that in another video. But right now, I want you to understand that that cancer cell will have tumor surface antigens, those antigens are there to fight off anything that might harm or kill that cancer cell. So cancer cells are pretty smart. They’re not dumb. So the dendritic cell, will actually they are ones that don’t have to be activated. A lot of the immune cells do have to be activated, but the dendritic cells don’t need to be activated at all. They will have long extensions on them. If you were to look up under the microscope, you would you would be able to tell a dendritic cell real quickly, because they look a little different. They got these long. I don’t want to say tentacles or arms, the science calls some extensions

Now I’m going to kind of give you a little demonstration of what I did. I now believe me, none of these videos I give you are professional. This has kind of become my little hobby during COVID. And I love teaching, I love to teach the patients because, once again, I think if you know a little bit, then you can get a little bit of hope, and it can help you go a long way. Well, you remember, as a kid, you found a little egg that had Silly Putty in it. You remember what Silly Putty is? Well, I took some, I had some silly putty around the house. I have still kid in me. But anyway, I took the silly putty, and I made it into a dendritic cell. Told you it wasn’t a professional video. But anyway, they have dendritic cells have these little tentacles, and they are have extensions in now, all cells, even dendritic cells have a nucleus somewhere within it. A nucleus. Now the nucleus is I like to just say it’s kind of the brain for the for the cell. That nucleus tells the cell when it’s time to eat, when it needs to move, when it needs to do certain things when it needs to produce chemicals. Okay, we are made up of a lot of chemicals can’t i can’t deny that one. But these extensions recognize the cancer cells by specialized. TLRs, I hope I’m saying it correctly, I think I am. But it’s TLRs, I have learned that I am from the south. When I moved to the west coast, certain things that we pronounced in the south is not pronounced completely the way we now pronounced them in the world on the west coast. Even when I was in medical school, I could see that there was differences. So sometimes I don’t always pronounce things maybe quite the way certain people do. But I try. So these TLR signals to the dendritic cell nucleus, one thing I wanted to mention tlrs are? Well, I’ll mention that in a minute. But TLR signals to the dendritic cells, nucleus to start the chemically induced cytokines. cytokines are important, but the cytokines start to invade. The cytokines also start off the alarms for the other fighters all around saying come help, come help. It’s like when the police are policing the neighborhood looking for all the bad guys, or, or a bad guy and the bad guy comes around, and he’s fine. He or she finds out that they’re going to need backup, they’ll start calling come I need help, we need help. So all those other fighters or police will come in. 

So the dendrix or like the police, okay, they’re long extensions will capture these extensions will capture those antigens, that’s on the surface of the tumor markers. Well, the surface of the cancer, tumor surface antigens, so these long extensions will come and grab and capture those antigens, tumor surface antigens. Now they load the cancer antigens into what they call the MHC class one and two molecules. And it gets a little deep. So we won’t really talk about that. I just hope I’m giving you the biggest points, just to give you enough to imagine, but they also have what they call p r r, PRRs. Now that stands for a long word that we’re not even going to worry with. But PRRs look like a tuning fork. Have you ever been to your doctor and they hit that tuning fork fork to see how well you’re hearing or whatever? Well, they look like a tuning fork. And now this is definitely out of proportion, but a lot of these tentacles extensions will have a tuning fork attached to them and that helps to grab hold too

So dendritic cells are very important. They are used for vaccines. They are used for a lot of things, but you already have them there in your body for free. They are there. Sometimes people just don’t realize that with cancer, cancer cells replicate multiply a lot faster. So sometimes you need help with that immune system. And that’s kind of what we do at New Hope. Unlimited, we help expand those fighters for you in order to have an army. Well, the dendritic cells are like the police, and it calls in its army, and they will help destroy that cancer cell. And I hope I’ve made it sort of the where you can understand it a lot better. Most people when they hear the immune system, that dendritic cells are the ones that they think of first, and that’s why didn’t want to bring that one up first. We’ve talked about the natural killer cells. We’ve talked about the cytotoxic T cells. Those are huge fighters. And now we’ve talking about the dendritic cells, because the dendritic actually help those others to fight also, I hope I’ve helped you to understand a little bit of it. You are a marvelous, magnificent human being, if you just could understand and realize that. Hope to see you on the next video. Thanks for listening and have a wonderful rest of the day.