But I do own NNVC to share its.
Adult deer tick, Ixodes scapularis. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
It may be one of nature's repulsive little blood-sucking parasites, but the humble tick could yield a future cure for cancers of the skin, liver and pancreas, Brazilian researchers have discovered.
They have identified a protein in the saliva of a common South American tick, Amblyomma cajennense, that apparently reduces and can even eradicate cancerous cells while leaving healthy cells alone.
"This is a radical innovation," said Ana Marisa Chudzinski-Tavassi, the molecular biologist at the Instituto Butantan in Sao Paulo who is leading the research.
"The component of the saliva of this tick... could be the cure for cancer," she told AFP.
She said she stumbled on the properties of the protein, called Factor X active, while testing the anti-coagulant properties of the tick's saliva -- the way it stops blood thickening and clotting so the tick can keep gorging itself on its host.
The protein shares some characteristics with a common anti-coagulant called TFPI (Tissue Factor Pathway Inhibitor), specifically a Kunitz-type inhibitor which also has been shown to interfere with cell growth.
A theory that the protein might have an effect on cancerous cells led to laboratory tests on cell cultures -- which exceeded all expectations.
"To our surprise it didn't kill normal cells, which were also tested," Chudzinski-Tavassi said. "But it did kill the tumorous cells that were being analyzed."
In her modest lab in the institute, housed in a rundown building, a line of immobile bloated ticks could be seen lined up with straws under their heads.
The small amounts of saliva captured that way was reproduced many times over in yeast vats so that tests could be carried out on lab rats with cancer.
The results have been more than promising.
"If I treat every day for 14 days an animal's tumor, a small tumor, this tumor doesn't develop -- it even regresses. The tumor mass shrinks. If I treat for 42 days, you totally eliminate the tumor," the scientist said.
Producing a medicine from the find, though, will require years of clinical tests and a significant financial investment -- neither of which Brazil is geared to provide.
Chudzinski-Tavassi has applied for a patent on the tick protein, and is presenting her team's discovery in medical journals and conferences around the world.
But she says moving beyond her lab "proof of concept" will be frustratingly difficult.
"To discover this is one thing. To turn it into a medicine is a whole other thing entirely," she said.
Kanzius was diagnosed with terminal leukemia six years ago, and after 36 rounds of chemotherapy and meeting children enduring the same, he decided to find a better cure. One night, he had a flash of inspiration, aided by his lifetime of experience with radio equipment. High-powered radio waves are harmless to human flesh, but will heat up metal particles. So if you can somehow lodge bits of metal into cancer cells, you can cook them with radio waves without damaging healthy tissue.
So he started playing around with his wife’s pie tins to try to reflect and concentrate radio waves, and ended up creating a prototype device that could send radio waves between two boxes. He then shelled out another $200,000 to create a more advanced, high-powered version, which he tested out with a copper sulfate-injected hot dog. If you’re hungry for details about how it works (or for a radio-cooked hot dog), read the patent; basically, the metal got hot, the rest of the doggie stayed cold.
But you can’t really go around cancer wards injecting copper sulfate into people’s tumors—and breasts and prostates aren’t hot dogs—so after months of MacGyver moments, Kanzius finally went for a more high-tech tool: nanoparticles. Nanoparticles can be made out of metal, and thousands can fit inside a single cell. Kanzius took this idea to M.D. Anderson liver cancer surgeon Dr. Steven Curley.
Conveniently, one of Dr. Curley’s patients was Rick Smalley, the Nobel laureate who discovered carbon nanoparticles. Curley asked if he could experiment with some of his metal nanoparticles, and Kanzius ended up using his machine to “blow the smithereens out of [them].”
Curley has now used “the Kanzius machine” to cook cancer out of rabbits, and Dr. David Geller at the University of Pittsburgh has used it to destroy liver cancer cells in rats—which he even demonstrated on 60 Minutes.
The big problem is targeting only the cancer cells. Curley mentions that his goal is to find a way for the nanoparticles to bind only the cancer cells, but this is a serious challenge. People have already been trying to target chemo drugs for many years with limited success.
But if the device doesn’t turn out to be the cancer killer he hoped for, Kanzius can figure out how to use his machine for other purposes—last year, for example, he used it to burn salt water.