Raena Morgan: We’re visiting with Dr. Larry Robinson, who’s the vice president of scientific affairs at Embria Health Sciences. EpiCor activates natural killer cells in the body. What do those cells do? Could you explain that?
Dr. Larry Robinson: Well, natural killer cells are very, very important for immune defense. They’re not as specific as antigens and antibodies, which are another part of your immune system, but natural killer cells do just what they say. They kill cells, but importantly, they only kill the bad cells.
They have this unique ability. They can go and look at the cells in your body they can tell your own cells, your body cells, not invading bacteria but they can look at your body’s cells and say this cell’s not right; something’s wrong. So, if you have a cell that’s been infected by a virus, natural killer cells can kill that cell before the virus can replicate, destroy that cell, and then go infect a lot of other cells. It kills it in the right way so it doesn’t cause a pro-inflammatory response.
Likewise, it can also look at and transform malignant cells. And many people think the body’s constantly making these cancer cells, but you don’t get sick because a natural, healthy immune system has these natural killer cells that can look at the cells and say wait a minute, this cell’s not right, something’s wrong with it and they recognize the malignant cell and they destroy it. So these are very important cells to keep you healthy.
Raena Morgan: And EpiCor activates those natural killer cells?
Dr. Larry Robinson: We’ve done laboratory studies that show that the natural killer cells are very significantly activated by EpiCor.
Raena Morgan: Well, that’s really fascinating. How about b cells? It activates b cells. Could you explain what b cells are?
Dr. Larry Robinson: B cells are another type of immune cells and these two are very important. Earlier, I mentioned that there are 2 aspects of the immune system: the innate and the adaptive. The adaptive is the slower to respond, but much more specific. And it’s specific because you have the antigen antibody response, which is extremely specific.
The cells that make the all important antibodies are called b cells.
Raena Morgan: Okay.
Dr. Larry Robinson: So to get this proper adaptive response, you need active, working b cells to make your antibodies when you’re sick and we found that EpiCor activates these b cells so that they can respond properly.
Raena Morgan: So the natural killer cells seek out the errant cells and the b cells create antibodies or make antibodies?
Dr. Larry Robinson: Right. The b cells are much more specific in that they have these b cell receptors, which really affect our anti bodies that recognize specific antigens so that you have this very specific action, whereas natural killer cells work through a different mechanism, that I’m not going to go into now but they just recognize cells that have been affected by viruses or have become malignant and so forth.
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