London, March 26: A team of Canadian researchers has found a novel way to stop the most aggressive cancerous tumours from growing and spreading. They found that simply modifying a natural tumour-inhibiting protein, von Hippel-Lindau, could suppress growth in even the most dense tumours.
A study, conducted on mice, showed that the disease was stopped in its tracks and tumours shrank by 50 percent.
According to researchers, one day the discovery could be used as a therapy for patients suffering aggressive cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, brain, lungs and kidneys.
Researchers were able to create a new version of the protein that destroyed cancerous cells at the heart of solid tumours where oxygen levels are low – which the natural human protein cannot do.
“A pharmaceutical company could take this bio-engineered protein and deliver gene therapy methods that can infect human cells. This is very, very exciting,” the Daily Express quoted lead author Professor Michael Ohh, in Toronto, as saying.
ANI