OX 40 plays an important role in enabling immune cells to work better and kill cancer cells more effectively.
The Homeovitality TumOX40 has been designed to target the OX40 gene, the gene that encodes the OX 40 cytotoxic T-cell immune stimulant.
What does the OX40 gene do?
There are a number of different types of cells within the immune system. One of them, a type of T cell called a cytotoxic T cell, plays an important role in the killing of cancer or tumour cells.
Recognition of the existence of tumour-specific T cells confirms that the immune response can be deployed to combat cancer. However, T cell cytotoxic activity is often suppressed in the environment of a tumour, resulting in impairment of the tumour specific cytotoxic T cell's ability to kill its target tumour cells.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that members of the tumour necrosis factor superfamily direct many parts of the immune system. One family member, OX40 has been found to be a key factor that augments T-cell expansion, cytokine production, and survival of tumour specific cytotoxic T cells. Studies over the last decade or so have also confirmed that OX40 does in fact increase the ability of cytotoxic T cells to recognise cancer cells as being immunologically foreign and increase their capacity to kill them (see Ref. 1 and within).
Reference to how OX40 can stimulate the activity of tumour specific cytotoxic T-cells is diagrammatically represented in the Agonox literature [2].
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