Researchers Say They Can Cure Cancer In Mice

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. —Monday night brought stunning news about the battle against cancer.
Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine said they have found a cure for cancer -- in mice, that is.
However, they are hoping that what they have learned will someday be applied to human treatments.
Three years ago, Wake Forest researchers discovered a mouse that could not get cancer no matter how hard they tried to give it the disease.
Now, they said white blood cells from that mouse's descendants were injected into ordinary mice with cancer and their disease was completely wiped out.
The treatment worked with a variety of cancers, including those similar to end-stage human cancers.
?This is a really remarkable recovery from a very aggressive tumor,? Wake Forest cancer researcher Dr. Zheng Cui said.
The mice did not suffer any side effects from the treatment. They had no problems with rejection.
The goal now is to find a human treatment that could avoid the rejection problem by using a patient's own cells.
White cells from a cancer patient would be combined in a test tube with the specific anti-cancer gene and then given back to the same patient.
?The hope would be that those activated white blood cells would be able to treat that person's cancer successfully,? Wake Forest Pathologist Dr. Mark Willingham said.
In mice, the white blood cells were able to find the cancers no matter where they were located in the body, suggesting that the cancer cells produce some kind of signal that the killer cells can detect.
The treatment also worked with naturally occurring cancers.
Next steps include trying to determine exactly how the cancer-fighting mechanism works, and Wake Forest researchers are working on a specific test that can indicate cancer resistance in humans.
A cure is still a long way off, but they believe that, like mice, there are humans out there with genes to fight cancer