Cancer is a real problem, it is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and I can honestly say every single person I know has been affected by it in some way. Cancer is complicated and difficult, there are tons of different kinds of cancer and while research has been done for quite some time a universal cure has not yet been identified though there are some treatments that work much better than others and alternative medicine seems to have quite a following.
Chemotherapy is often ineffective for many reasons one being that the rate cancer cells spread is far too quick for them to keep up. That being said researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK have been working in partnership with Cancer Research UK to find a way to aid treatments by slowing down the spread of quite a few different kinds of cancers.
Their research was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and focused on the enzyme known as NOX4 as well as a kind of cell referred to as cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs). You see when a healthy fibroblast is infected by cancer it is turned into a CAF, these are known to help tumors spread and grow. I guess you could say they help to make cancer itself aggressive.
These researchers found that when testing on mice blocking NOX4 reduced the size of the tumors by up to about 50 percent. In many types of cancer, NOX4 enzymes are necessary for CAFs to form. The drug they used is one that has been used to treat a disease called organ fibrosis. These findings show that CAFs can be targeted with a drug and that their pro-tumor effects can be reversed in mice. Researchers hope to come up with a more effective version of this in the future.
This is something they believe could help improve a patients chances of reacting positively to whatever kind of treatment they choose to undergo. Then also regardless of treatment effectivity, it would slow down the cancer spread allowing these people a little more time here with their loved ones. What do you think about all of this?
In a world riddled with cancer, any step taken to slow it down or get rid of it is a step in the right direction. For more on the growth and spread of cancer check out the video below. Cancer is a terrible thing and we can only hope that someday the cancer industry is destroyed.
This article contains information from Futurism and Science Daily.
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