Natural killer cells normally play an important role in inducing apoptosis of cancerous cells and others that have been infected with viruses.
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Two specific types of immune system cell that attack invaders - CD4 T-cells and natural killer cells - increased in number with age, with a higher rate of increase in women than in men.
One way is to deliver the bit of the virus you want the killer cells to respond to using another virus which doesn't cause human disease a sort of vaccine Trojan horse.
They include compounds that block bad genes responsible for spreading cancer into the bones, chemicals that prompt prostate cancer cells to destroy themselves and vaccines that train the body's killer T cells to seek and destroy tumor cells.
If these can be identified, they hope that the number of these on the surface of tumour cells can be boosted, so they present an obvious target for "killer" cells in the body's immune system.
Ultimately, researchers will likely want to combine it with one of the vaccines being developed to stimulate production of killer T cells.
In addition, other types of cancer can interfere with the activation of "killer T cells" - immune cells which arrive to destroy tumour cells.
Not only did it increase production of a chemical which attracts "killer T cells" to the tumour site, it also switched these cells into an active state once they arrived.
Pfizer's drug tremelimumab and Bristol-Myers Squibb's ipilimumab are antibodies to a protein called CTLA-4 (cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen-4) that acts as an emergency brake to prevent killer T cells from attacking healthy tissue.
Mice given the modified cells produced more than six times the number of "killer T" cells, which are immune cells produced to neutralise a target.
They include compounds that block bad genes responsible for spreading cancer into the bones, chemicals that prompt prostate cancer cells to destroy themselves and vaccines that train the body's killer T-cells to seek and destroy tumor cells.
Peers in parliament's upper chamber voted by 212 to 92 on Monday to allow research using stem cells to develop treatments for killer diseases such as leukaemia, Parkinson's and cancer.
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