A Possible New Breakthrough In The Battle Against Cancer [Video]

Cancer is a nasty disease, just plain nasty, and it is a disease that kills indiscriminately with no regard to gender or economic status. It is also a disease that is constantly being researched in order to find effective ways to try and cure the many different types of cancers that there are.

Researchers at Stanford University believe that they may have found a new to battle the wide ranged of cancers which includes: ovarian, breast, colon, bladder, liver, and prostate; and results so from test on mice are looking pretty good so far.

What they have discovered is that by targeting a protein, CD47, that cancer cells use to signal the body’s innate immune system to not attack them they can actually get the immune system to attack the cancer cells. They found this out by examining cancer cells and found that they have higher levels of this CD47 protein than normal cells do and that the higher the CD47 levels the shorter the lifespan of cancer patients.

“It’s becoming very clear that, in order for a cancer to survive in the body, it has to find some way to evade the cells of the innate immune system,” said Irving Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute of Stem Cell Biology.

via TDW

It is still early days but researchers are hoping to start stage 1 and stage 2 trials withing the next two years.

Antibody treatment shrinks or cures cancer tumors from Christopher Vaughan on Vimeo.

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Tags: cancer, Discovery

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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).