adjuvant

Meanings

1. Providing assistance or help; assistive, facilitative, helpful.
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.

1. Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.
2. An additive (often a separate product) that enhances the efficacy of a pesticide, but has little or no pesticidal effect itself.
3. A substance enhancing the immune response to an antigen.
4. A form of therapy or treatment which is additional or supplementary to another, or which enhances the effectiveness of another.
5. An additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug.

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 sense 3 (“of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary”) and 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).

Translations