The heart of the matter
A new discovery made by a scientist in Florida may very well become the final frontier in the war on cancer. And, once again, the potential cure for what the medical community has considered an "incurable" disease is something completely natural -- at least for now. Last week, David Vesely, a doctor at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa and professor of medicine, molecular pharmacology, and physiology at the University of South Florida, presented his groundbreaking study at the 2008 Experimental Biology Conference. In it, he used hormones produced by the heart to eliminate cancer in mice. He began his research back in 2002, after his wife lost her battle against breast cancer. Previously, he had discovered that the heart produces three different hormones, which, among other things, help regulate blood vessel dilation. Knowing that these hormones also control cell growth, Vesely decided to test their effects on cancer cells. He used colon, ovarian, breast, prostate, and pancreatic cells and found that when he added the heart hormones to the cultures, 97 percent of the cancers were destroyed within 24 hours. When he tested his approach in mice, the results were slightly less staggering, but still impressive nonetheless: The heart hormones eliminated pancreatic cancer in 80 percent of the mice injected with it, and cured 66 percent of the mice injected with breast cancer. And even the cases of pancreatic cancer the hormones didn't completely cure got dramatically better, shrinking the tumors to as little as 2 percent of their original size. Not a single mouse Vesely used in his study died from cancer. In fact, they all lived a normal mouse life span. And when they did die of "old age" the "mouse autopsies" showed that their cancers hadn't spread. Of course, Vesely is still working on raising money to start human trials of this treatment, so there's still a long way to go before it could be available to the general public. And that road could be even longer if the pharmaceutical industry gets wind of the "potential" here (and I don't mean the potential to save lives). If that happens, they'll undoubtedly enlist the FDA to use its ever-present red tape to tie up any progress Vesely makes with his natural heart hormone therapy until they can come up with a synthetic -- and patentable -- version. For now, though, this is still an extremely promising, potentially life-saving discovery -- one that, once again, we can thank Mother Nature for. Source:
"Hormones produced by heart eliminated human cancer in most mice treated," ScienceDaily (www.sciencedaily.com), 2/27/08 |
