The world scientific community is waging a difficult and prolonged war on cancer. New research in the field of immunogenic cell death can extend the area of drugs application and ensure patients' protection from relapse after therapy. Cancer treatment is not just the removal of the tumor cells from the body, and chemotherapy. The doctors' aim is to provide a scenario that would prevent tumor cells from proliferating and causing a new disease. For many years, scientists at the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod and the University of Ghent (Belgium) have been engaged in research aimed to minimize the harm to the body after cancer treatment and have been looking for new approaches to treating cancer patients. The project, supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation and headed by Dmitry Krys'ko, PhD, leading researcher of the Lobachevsky University's Institute of Biology and Biomedicine, Professor at Ghent University, has yielded its first major results. According to Professor Krys'ko, the existing anti-cancer therapy (chemotherapy, radiation therapy and photodynamic therapy) causes great damage to the body as a whole, while his team's research is aimed at the stimulation of immunogenic cell death, which not only minimizes the damage, but also enhances the efficacy of treatment by involving the body's resources in the fight against cancer. "In this study, we tested some drugs for anticancer therapy based on photodynamic treatment and investigated their new immunogenic properties. We can say that not only the external impact will be used to fight cancer, but also the body itself will engage in the fight by triggering the reactions of the adaptive immune response.Login Or Register To Read Full Story