Sometime in the near future, we will learn to pitch the innate immune system’s wrath against cancer cells; to calm it in the case of autoimmune diseases; to augment it to create a new generation of vaccines against pathogens. Once we teach our innate immune cells to attack malignant cells in humans, we will have invented an entirely new mode of cell therapy that harnesses inflammation. Perhaps we might describe it, metaphorically, as a pox on cancer.
