Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 51st Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : July 03, 2024 - July 05, 2024
Chronic arsenic exposure due to the contamination of drinking water with high concentrations of arsenic compounds has become a serious problem throughout the world, particularly in Asian regions such as Bangladesh and Cambodia. Chronic exposure to arsenic compounds has serious health effects, with carcinogenesis being the most serious. According to a WHO study, tens of millions of people in Bangladesh are exposed to arsenic and rore than 200,000 arsenic-exposed patients die from cancer each year.
Some studies have been reported aimed at clarifying the carcinogenic mechanism caused by arsenic exposure, however, the detailed mechanism is not well understood. The basis for this is that although arsenic compounds are carcinogens that are recognized to cause cancer in humans, this cannot be reproduced in animal models. Based on these investigations, arsenic compounds are considered to be "non-genotoxic carcinogens."
Our laboratory is currently investigating the possibility that the immune system might be impaired in the carcinogenic mechanism caused by arsenic compounds. Through a series of research studies, we discovered that arsenic compounds weaken the function of natural killer (NK) cells, which are involved in killing cancer cells in innate immunity. In this symposium, we will introduce the mechanism by which the cancer cell-killing function of NK cells is impaired by arsenic compounds.
