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Adjuvant
Definitions
- 1 Providing assistance or help; assistive, facilitative, helpful. formal
- 2 Enhancing the immune response to an antigen; also, containing a substance having such an effect.
- 3 Of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary; specifically (oncology), of a cancer treatment: given after removal of a primary tumour.
"Adjuvant chemotherapy, [Paul] Carbone conjectured, could be the surgeon's little helper. It would eradicate microscopic deposits of cancer left behind after surgery, thus extirpating any remnant reservoirs of malignancy in the body in early breast cancer— […]"
- 1 enhancing the action of a medical treatment wordnet
- 2 furnishing added support wordnet
- 1 Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.; An additive (often a separate product) that enhances the efficacy of a pesticide, but has little or no pesticidal effect itself. formal
- 2 an additive that enhances the effectiveness of medical treatment wordnet
- 3 Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.; A substance enhancing the immune response to an antigen. formal
"The well-known tropic action of immune serum as an adjuvant to phagocytosis suggested early in our studies that we might here be dealing with a similar phenomenon."
- 4 Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.; A form of therapy or treatment which is additional or supplementary to another, or which enhances the effectiveness of another. formal
- 5 Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.; An additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug. archaic, formal
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin adiuvant-, adjuvant- + English -ant (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘exhibiting a condition or process’; and forming agent nouns). Adiuvant-, adjuvant- are oblique stems of adiuvāns, adjuvāns (“assisting, helping”), the present active participle of adiuvō (“to assist, help; to be useful; etc.”), from ad- (“prefix meaning ‘to; toward’”) + iuvō (“to aid, help; to save”) (possibly from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ewH- (“to assist, help; to save”)). Adjective adjective sense 3 (“of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary”) and noun noun sense 1.4 (“additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug”) are possibly derived from French adjuvant (adjective, noun).
Learned borrowing from Latin adiuvant-, adjuvant- + English -ant (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘exhibiting a condition or process’; and forming agent nouns). Adiuvant-, adjuvant- are oblique stems of adiuvāns, adjuvāns (“assisting, helping”), the present active participle of adiuvō (“to assist, help; to be useful; etc.”), from ad- (“prefix meaning ‘to; toward’”) + iuvō (“to aid, help; to save”) (possibly from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ewH- (“to assist, help; to save”)). Adjective adjective sense 3 (“of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary”) and noun noun sense 1.4 (“additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug”) are possibly derived from French adjuvant (adjective, noun).
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