Incredible New Research Shows How Malaria Protein Could Help To Fight Cancer!

“This is an extraordinary finding that paves the way for targeting sugar molecules in pediatric and adulthood human cancer, and our groups are vigorously pursuing this possibility together”, highlights Poul Sorensen, co-senior investigator of the study.

“Scientists have spent decades trying to find biochemical similarities between placenta tissue and cancer, but we just didn’t have the technology to find it”, said project leader Mads Daugaard, an assistant professor of urologic science at UBC and a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, part of the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.

While investigating a way to create an effective malaria vaccine for pregnant women without it attacking the placenta, Danish researchers found that their experimental malaria vaccine can attack cancer cells.

However, the vaccine will not be recommended for pregnant women because the added toxin will attack the placenta as it will be believe it is a tumor. “The placenta is an organ, which within a few months grows from only few cells into an organ weighing [approximately] 2 pounds, and it provides the embryo with oxygen and nourishment in a relatively foreign environment”. They have found that a malaria protein can be beneficial against the disease. “In a manner of speaking, tumors do much the same-they grow aggressively in a relatively foreign environment”.

In laboratory experiments, researchers found that if they used the malarial protein, VAR2CSA, and attached an anti-cancer drug to it, it would bind with the oncofetal protein in the cancer, delivering the drug to the tumour.

The carbohydrate’s primary goal in the placenta is to ensure its growth which serves also the same objective in tumors.

“We examined the carbohydrate’s function”. He continues, “By conducting tests on mice, we have been able to show that the combination of protein and toxin kill the cancer cells”.

Taking this concept, the researchers carried out a process in which they have combined a small amount of protein that the malaria vaccine uses to put into cells and combined it with a toxin, so that can then bury into cancer cells and release toxins to kill them. The drug will soon have its future use in clinical trials which will probably take about three to four years, Medical News Today reports. However, the treatment will be very unsafe to cancer patients who are pregnant because the combination of malaria protein and toxins will attack both cancer cells and the placenta.