"Right now, the research was done only on laboratory-grown cancer cells and not in patients. The next step will be animal testing, before human trials can begin. But this signals hope for cancer patients and their loved ones."
"Cancer impacts so many lives; this writer knows five people who are personally battling the disease and she lost her uncle to pancreatic cancer in 2014. But Japanese researchers may have just made an incredible breakthrough in fighting the disease, finding a way to get cancer cells to undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death — and it may be a major step forward in curing some types of cancer.
"Apoptosis is essential for normal cell development, the maintenance of tissues, and in preventing cancer. It's a natural, highly-regulated process in which a cell self-destructs when it's damaged, no longer needed, or potentially harmful to the body. Unlike necrosis — cell death caused by disease or injury — apoptosis doesn't cause inflammation.
"Using carbon monoxide, Japanese researchers have figured out how to trigger apoptosis as well as the suppression of cancer cell growth and mild cytotoxicity (capacity of a substance, chemical, or immune cell to damage or destroy living cells) in cancer cells only, while healthy cells remain untouched." . . .
For cancer treatment to be the most effective, it must kill the cancer without producing harmful side effects. For traditional chemotherapies, the side effects may end up being just as harmful as the cancer. Tanaka and like-minded researchers are trying to improve treatments by devising new technologies that selectively target tumors. At RIKEN, rather than injecting the body with cancer-killing drugs, Tanaka’s goal is to eventually inject patients with harmless compounds that can be used to make drugs on the fly after they are picked up by cancer cells.
Most of us know about carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas commonly produced by the burning of gasoline in car engines. Recently, research has shown that many types of cancer cells also produce this gas. This makes carbon monoxide a kind of cancer biomarker, but only if it can be detected. In the newly published experiments, scientists in the Biofunctional Synthetic Chemistry Laboratory at RIKEN PRI tested a system for bringing a metal catalyst into cells and then using it and excess carbon monoxide to make a toxic bioactive compound. Because cancer cells have excess carbon monoxide and healthy cells do not, only the cancer cells are exposed to the cytotoxic drug.
. . . More.

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