A new study has revealed that single-celled parasite in cats' intestines may cure Cancer.
According to researchers, Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), which affects about one-third of the world's population causes the body to produce natural killer cells and cytotoxic T cells, which wage war against cancer cells.
David J. Bzik, professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, said that they know biologically this parasite has figured out how to stimulate the exact immune responses you want to fight cancer.
The researchers said that Cancer can shut down the body's defensive mechanisms, but introducing T. gondii into a tumor environment can jump start the immune system.
Barbara Fox, senior research associate of Microbiology and Immunology, said that the biology of this organism is inherently different from other microbe-based immunotherapeutic strategies that typically just tickle immune cells from the outside and by gaining preferential access to the inside of powerful innate immune cell types, their mutated strain of T. gondii reprograms the natural power of the immune system to clear tumor cells and cancer.
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Since it isn't safe to inject a cancer patient with live replicating strains of T. gondii, Bzik and Fox have created "cps," an immunotherapeutic vaccine and based on the parasite's biochemical pathways, they deleted a Toxoplasma gene needed to make a building block of its genome and create a mutant parasite that can be grown in the laboratory but is unable to reproduce in animals or people.
Cps is both nonreplicating and safe and even when the host is immune deficient, cps still retains that unique biology that stimulates the ideal vaccine responses.
Bzik added that Cps stimulates amazingly effective immunotherapy against cancers, superior to anything seen before and the ability of cps to communicate in different and unique ways with the cancer and special cells of the immune system breaks the control that cancer has leveraged over the immune system.
