Okay so I know that the topic for Passion posts this week didn’t change, but as I was getting ready to type up a post on something related to glass art, a friend of mine sent me this article and told me I needed to read it. I want all of you to see it too, I’ve never heard of a claim so strong for cancer being cured, especially on a news site (well Fox news), but anyways.. here’s the gist of it:
Anti-CD47
“Scientists Find Treatment to Kill Every Kind of Cancer Tumor”
So apparently, there’s this protein called CD47 that is produced in healthy blood cells in normal amounts. The protein is harmful in large amounts and tricks the immune system into not destroying it by giving off a “do not eat” signal. Although, what has been found by researchers at Stanford University (thank you ivy league education) is that cancer cells produce an excessive, crazy amount of this protein that causes it to be harmful to the body. So, because CD47 is a sneaky little … yeah… the researchers at Stanford have constructed an antibody that blocked it’s tricky “do not eat” signals so that the immune system would destroy it. (As it rightly should!)
At this point, researchers have tested the antibody on mice with transplanted human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors. In every single case, the antibody blocked CD47’s signal’s and forced the mice’s immune system to kill the cancer cells!
Irving Weissman
“We showed that even after the tumor has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumor or slow its growth and prevent metastasis,” said biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California.
The only side effect of the antibody was that some healthy cells fell under short-term attacks of the mice’s immune system, but in comparison to the actual damage being done by the cancer cells, the benefit is insurmountable.
Irving Weismann’s group recently received a $20 million dollar grant to move research from mice to human testing…
I hope this is it!
You can find the articles here:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/every_cancer_kills_tumor_them_kind_L9lppJmy9gCoS848cSzqbP
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/03/27/scientists-find-treatment-to-kill-every-kind-cancer-tumor/