Does a Super Mouse Hold Key to Beating Cancer?
MONDAY, May 8 (HealthDay News) — Researchers say they were able to cure advanced cancers in ordinary mice by transplanting white blood cells from a line of tumor-resistant mice. “Even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors were eradicated,” researcher Dr. Zheng Cui, an associate professor of pathology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a prepared statement. Not only did the transplanted white blood cells destroy existing cancers, they also protected the normal mice from what normally would be lethal doses of highly aggressive new cancers, the researchers reported in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This is the very first time that this exceptionally aggressive type of cancer was treated successfully. Never before has this been done with any other therapy,” Cui said. The cancer-resistant mice stem from a single mouse discovered in 1999. “The cancer resistance trait so