Scientists unveiled a new cancer treatment on Monday that can remove tumors, reduce side effects and prevent the disease from coming back better than current techniques. The treatment, called Caspase Independent Cell Death (CICD), showed to effectively remove tumors in experimental models. Unlike chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy,
Immunotherapy is an emerging field in the global fight against cancer, even though scientists and clinicians have been working for decades to find ways to help the body's immune system detect and attack cancerous cells. Doug Mahoney's lab at the University of Calgary recently discovered an immunotherapy that uses existing cancer drugs in a whole new way. "What we found is a combination of cancer therapies that complement each other in helping the immune system clear the cancer," says Mahoney, PhD, assistant professor in the departments of Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Cumming School of Medicine and member of the Arnie Charbonneau Cancer and Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institutes.
Scientists have discovered a process to trigger the death of cancer cells that they believe could be more effective than current methods. Existing therapies often fail to kill all the cancer cells, leading to a recurrence of the disease. The new method - called Caspase Independent Cell Death (CICD) - led to the complete eradication of tumours in experimental models. University of Glasgow scientists plan to investigate the technique further. Most anti-cancer therapies such as chemotherapy, radiation or immunotherapy work by killing cancer cells through a process called apoptosis, which activates proteins called caspases, leading to cell death. However in apoptosis, some cancer cells often survive