Cancer has undoubtedly been one of our hottest topics of discussion. And this is of course is for good reason. The dreaded disease has been a plague upon our species for a long time. And sometimes even when our greatest minds find fixes for certain cases, most cancers somehow seem to find a way to rise from the dead and comes back to haunt its victims. So, a few scientists from KU Leuven, the University of Bremen, the Leibniz Institute of Materials Engineering, and the University of ioannina decided to work together to try and figure out a way to keep cancers from coming back. And with their combined efforts the team actually managed to pull it off! Let us take a look at how they managed to achieve this impressive feat.

Immunotherapy has been a common way through which doctors treat cancer patients in recent times. The idea behind this involves using one’s own immune system as the main weapon to fight off cancers. And although it has helped many individuals, in some cases the method turned out to be not as effective as expected. So, the team of researchers physicists and chemical, got to work and through their experiments, eventually found out that tumors are sensitive to copper oxide. When this compound enters a living organism, the nanoparticles present in them dissolve and become toxic. The researchers then used this property in a positive way by utilizing iron oxide to control this process and eliminate cancer cells. They also designed the procedure in such a way that it did not have any effect on healthy cells.

When metal oxides enter a human body, they can cause disastrous effects. But scaling it down to the nano level before ingesting, as demonstrated by the researchers, can yield totally different results altogether. But even though the team used copper oxide for its benefits, the problem of recurrence was still not resolved. So, in order to obtain a permanent fix, the researchers combined their method with regular immunotherapy to improve its effectiveness. And the results of this new combination was groundbreaking. Through experiments, they noticed that the copper compounds not only killed tumor cells directly but also assisted the immune system in fighting foreign substances. 

This effectively made the tumors disappear for good and helped researchers confirm its power as a vaccine against colon and lung cancer- the two types of cancers that were under examination in this research. The experiments they performed involved the usage of mouse models. By injecting tumor cells into mice, the researchers observed that the cells were immediately eliminated when they treated the mice using their new method and thus received their stamp of approval.  

The birth of this treatment technique is sure to send ripples across the medical world. With its potential ability to safely treat patients without the need for harmful chemotherapy, this new method is not only effective but also very safe. Moreover, the fact that it can be extended to treat other types of cancer further cements its status as an important discovery in the field of medical sciences. Now that the researchers have a solid starting point, the development of more refined and better procedures for treatment is definitely an inevitability.