Cancer ‘Disguised’ as Pork: Breakthrough Therapy Shows 90% Success

In a potential paradigm shift for cancer treatment, Chinese researchers have pioneered a novel therapy that tricks the body into attacking tumors by “disguising” them as pig tissue. This innovative approach, leveraging the body’s natural immune response to organ transplant rejection, has demonstrated a remarkable 90% success rate in early trials.

The study, published in the journal Cell, details how researchers engineered a virus to make cancer cells appear as foreign as pig tissue to the immune system. This “tumor-to-pork” strategy triggers a hyperacute inflammatory response, directing the body’s defenses to aggressively target and destroy the cancerous cells.

Professor Zhao Yongxiang, director of the State Key Laboratory of Targeting Oncology at Guangxi Medical University, spearheaded the research. His team utilized the Newcastle disease virus (NDV), a relatively harmless virus in humans, and inserted a pig gene into it, creating a mutated NDV-GT virus.

When this virus infects cancer cells, the introduced pig gene effectively signals a foreign invasion, prompting the body to reject the altered cells. This approach essentially cloaks the cancer, causing the immune system to react more aggressively.

Initial animal studies, including trials on monkeys, yielded promising results, paving the way for human trials. The study involved 23 patients with various advanced cancers, including liver, ovarian, cervical, and lung cancers. Patients received weekly infusions of the engineered virus over a period of 8 to 12 weeks.

The outcomes were significant, with patients experiencing partial remission, clinically viable cures, and a halt in tumor growth. Overall, the clinical trials exhibited a 90% success rate with minimal adverse effects.

Currently, the clinical trials are progressing into phases 2 and 3, focusing on evaluating the treatment’s efficacy and safety profile further. This groundbreaking research offers a promising new avenue in the fight against cancer, potentially harnessing the body’s own immune system to defeat this formidable disease.

Source: Cell