New Cancer Drug Shrinks All Tumors!?!
A new cancer-fighting drug has successfully shrunk every tumor its been tested on.
This is a potentially huge breakthrough in the fight to cure cancer-- The amazing work was done by a team at the Stanford University Medical Center that piggybacked on the knowledge that people with cancer have a lot more of these surface markers, called CD47, that say to the immune system, “don't eat me”, essentially protecting bad cancer cells from being killed off.
So they designed an antibody to shut these CD-47s up and introduced it into human cancer cells - not into humans directly yet, but in cells they took from humans and put in petri dishes and lab mice, and it worked: they found that when a variety of tumors, ranging from breast to brain, were hit with the antibody treatment, the CD47s were blocked, resulting in shrinking tumors, and a stopping of the spread of cancer. It worked in 10 out of the 10 mice they tested it on.
This is so good, so groundbreaking, the team is now working with a $20 million grant to move from mouse trials to safety tests in humans. Now these results are maybe the most exciting ever in the history of cancer research, but there's still a ton of work to do. The microenvironment of a tumor interacting with the rest of the human body is way more complicated than treating a transplanted tumor in a mouse or one that's just lying in a petri dish.
Tumors in humans could have additional immune suppressing effects that scientists will have to overcome and the antibody treatment used in this study could also create unknown side effects on the rest of the body. But that said, this story makes it seems like the fight to cure cancer is becoming more winnable by the day.
