Alex Beck
4th period Biology

	Scientists use small pulses of electricity to fuse human-tumor cells with immune cells to create a vaccine that will work on a person’s cells. In the first experimental trial of this experiment, 7 of the 17 patients who had metastic kidney cancer were found to have tumor-specific immune responses when given the vaccine. The property of the dendritic cells enables it to produce the correct antigens to destroy the cancer cells when it is fused with them. These experiment are very controversial because if the immune system attacks the cancer cells, it might also attack healthy cells. Research on this method is being done on breast cancer patients and melanoma patients in Berlin. Response rates are 40% on average, but hopefully in the future this therapy will become more common and yield even higher response rates.