We are very grateful to Dr. Radvanyi for his keen analysis and stimulating suggestions for possible ways to offset the effects of aging on the immune system. We do not question the desirability for having standardized assays of “immune health” that can be applied to all cancer patients, but the assays must be relevant to the outgrowth of cancer and not to other measurable immune responses.
We can construct such assays for mice of various inbred strains where multiple individuals of different ages of each strain are available (1). But we are unable, probably due to lack of imagination, to envision such tests for individuals in outbred populations. Our concern is that assays unrelated to an individual's response to a cancer will be developed and exploited commercially, just as some screening tests for other diseases have been exploited. For this reason, we warn against the misinterpretation of this part of Dr. Radvanyi's letter.
See the original Letter to the Editor, p. 6074
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.
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