https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/08/t-cells-burn-out-just-a-few-hours-after-encountering-cancer-tumors/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned
Why do T cells become exhausted within a few hours of bumping into cancer?
Isn't this a strange article title? The whole point of it is to show T cells don't actually get "burned out" at all. And imo it's not like the real reason is uninteresting.
Why dress the article in the exact thing it's refuting?
It's a common pattern with headlines. When I see this I assume the headline was modified for clickbait sake, by an editor or someone who didn't write the article. And it probably make the author cringe.
I mean it read to me like they were saying that cytotoxic T cells became permanently dysfunctional (the term “exhausted” is used in the paper this news article is about) when encountering cancer cells. I’m not sure I see why the title is incorrect.
IMO the title is incorrect because the common interpretation of getting "burned out" is that of the same individuals of a population losing effectiveness after working hard. The article even likens the term "exhausted" the same interpretation of the phrase:
Altogether, our research suggests that T cells in tumors are not necessarily working hard and getting exhausted. Rather, they are blocked right from the start.
This same quote describes the truth of the phenomenon where it's not individuals getting "exhausted", but cellular signalling permanently altering the expression of T cells to make them less and less effective.
A more correct title would be something like:
Cancer makes every generation of T cells worse than the last
My girlfriend works on T-cells (she's not affiliated with the group in the article) so I understood about 4% of the science!