The advent of the Bristol-Myers Squibb drug Yervoy showed that a major new treatment for melanoma could be found by upregulating theimmune system to fight this disease.
Type I diabetes is thought tobe an "autoimmune" disease in which the body's own immune system - which is meant to fight foreign threats like bacteria - turns on the cells in a gland called the pancreas.
Very recently the Institute of Medicine of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Science published a review of the scientific literature and noted that vitamin D may be linked to heart disease, immune function, cancer prevention and diabetes.
In most people, this would only be of passing interest, but the woman suffers from inflammatory bowel disease and takes powerful drugs to suppress her immune system.