MONDAY, May 8, 2006 (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 far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendents in 14 generations," and has also been bred into three other mouse strains, Cui said.
A single injection of the white blood cells from a cancer-resistant mouse was enough to provide lifetime cancer protection for a normal mouse.
"The potency and selectivity for cancer cells are so high that, if we learned the mechanism, it would give us hope that this would work in humans," Cui said. "This would suggest that cancer cells send out a signal, but normal white blood cells can't find them."
"This study shows that you can use this resistant-cell therapy in mice and that the therapy works," co-investigator and pathologist Dr. Mark C. Willingham said in a prepared statement. "The next step is to understand the exact way in which it works, and perhaps eventually design such a therapy for humans."
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