re: " i have trouble understanding some of this stuff. "
This may be an over-simplification but describes a kind-of mental model I ended up with somehow after reading through a lot of the stuff on this.
It was discovered that cells have a kind of built-in emergency beacon that gets triggered, in effect, to sprout flags to signal the immune system if the cell goes haywire. Insidious cancer disables the signalling to hide itself, whereas the tapimmune approach goes in and repairs the locating beacons to enable the immune system to be able to find the bad cells again. The advantage to this is that healthy cells remain unaffected compared to a traditional approach of trying to use poison to kill the cancer, which tends to produce a lot of collateral cell death of healthy cells. Also, the immune system's killer t-cells lock on to the now brightly identifying cancer cell markers in a very specific way and remember the now, more clear, marker profile. This is also better than other approaches that simply over-stimulate the immune system in a general way which can cause problems if the system is unclear or gets confused on what to attack.
I might also add. that I also think that it is kind of illogical to require patients to undergo radiation and poison therapy first, which presumably damages the immune system, before being allowed to try the immunotherapy, a therapy that depends on a functioning immune system to be effective. It would seem to put us at an unfair disadvantage making it harder for it to work. If it still works at all, after all that, it must be pretty good.
