The Immune System of the human body is a highly sophisticated and complicated one. In the battle against diseases, we begin to realize that immunity is the foundation of good health. Immunity deficiency is considered to be one of the most critical reasons for many infectious diseases and also one of the main reasons to fall into the prey of malignancies. Therefore “Immunity Enhancement” has become one of the most important issues in basic and clinical oncology research to prevent cancer, increase the response rate of cancer treatment, and reduce the rate of cancer recurrence and metastasis.

What is immunity? In brief, immunity is the core defense mechanism in the human body. The mass proliferation of any invaded foreign bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites or other organisms will induce some kind of abnormality and that is why diseases occur. Normally our immune system is capable of recognizing and identifying these foreign invaders and actively launch the necessary defense mechanisms to kill or eliminate the invaders to keep us healthy. Every fine change or irregularity is constantly monitored. Once a problem is detected it will soon betaken care of immediately, without jeopardizing the normal tissues or cells. The immune system is equipped with the ability to differentiate the self from non-self and to eliminate the invading agent, simultaneously. It is this well functioned immune system that keeps the human body in healthy status. Therefore any weakening of immunity will be followed by various infectious diseases or malignancies.

The composition of human immune system is very diversified, but can generally be classified by specificity into two main categories, namely innate immunity and acquired immunity. In general, innate immunity does not target any particular disease-causing micro-organism and with this innate immunity the human body is able to eliminate foreign matters quite efficiently. The innate immunity consists of natural killer cells, neutrophils, macrophages and so on. These cells are fast acting and are the first-line defense against foreign pathogens in human body. Among them, natural killer cells are the most important and potent cells against cancerous cells and virus-infected cells. Acquired immunity (Figure 4) on the other hand has high specificity and it works to fight against “specific” foreign matters. Acquired immunity is further divided into two interrelated types of immune mechanisms, namely “Humoral Immunity” and “Cellular Immunity”. Lymphocytes play a very important role in acquired immunity as “Humoral Immunity” identifies and further eliminates specific pathogen by antibodies produced by B lymphocytes. “Cellular Immunity” on the other hand depends mainly on T lymphocytes.

Figure 4: Cells in the human immune system. IVY’s “Immune Killer Cell Technology” consists of mass proliferation and activation of NK cells and gdT Lymphocytes, for the purpose of fighting against cancer cells.