Cancer Curing Blood
9/15/2007 web-based article staff ScienCentralNews (www.sciencentral.com) It's a discovery in animals that would change everything if it turns out to be true in people. An injection of blood cells from cancer-resistant mice cures cancer in ordinary mice. As this ScienCentral News video explains, there may be a way to identify cancer-resistant people. The End of Cancer? A universal treatment that would work against any type of cancer has always seemed like a far-fetched fantasy. But now researchers at Wake Forest University have made a discovery in mice that might one day lead to a "magic bullet" against human cancers if it proves to be true in people. Several years ago, the researchers identified a rare strain of mouse immune to high, usually lethal doses of cancer cells. Now they have shown that not only are these mice cancer-resistant, but their immune cells are also capable of curing normal, non-resistant mice of any type of advanced cancer. As reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lead researcher Zheng Cui and his team injected white blood cells from the cancer-resistant mice into normal mice with aggressive cancers that should have killed them in two to three weeks. Instead, their cancer disappeared. "Cancer cells had already developed a large tumor in the mice, and at a different place [than] where we put the immune cells in," says Cui, "That would require the immune cells to find them at a different part of the body and then track them down to the [...]