Cancer: a disease of the cells that doctors have long struggled to find a cure for. Well, that is until a team of Danish researchers, inadvertently, discovered a possible remedy in the most obscure place possible: malaria protein.
While searching for a way to protect pregnant women from malaria, scientists found that the same malaria protein that attacks placenta can take out cancer cells, too.
Essentially, when the malaria vaccine is injected in someone, it draws on a protein within it to bury into malaria cells and then release the toxin required to kick the disease. And, as researchers uncovered, the same practice could possibly be applied to cancer cells.
“We have separated the malaria protein, which attaches itself to the carbohydrate and then added a toxin,” Mads Daugaard, a cancer researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada explains.
“By conducting tests on mice, we have been able to show that the combination of protein and toxin kill the cancer cells.”
One small step (or, lab slip-up) for man, one big step for mankind.
