Chinese scientists have found a surprising new way to fight cancer by using the body’s own immune system. Normally, when someone gets an organ transplant, their body sometimes rejects it because it sees it as foreign. Instead of seeing this as a problem, researchers in China figured out how to use this same reaction to attack cancer. In a study published earlier this year, scientists created a special virus that made cancer cells look like pig tissue. This tricked the body into thinking the tumor was something foreign, causing a super-strong immune response. The result? The virus attacked the cancer with a 90% success rate even curing a patient with advanced cervical cancer. This discovery could open up a whole new way to treat cancer. Scientists are excited but also cautious because cancer is a tricky disease. Still, this breakthrough shows that the immune system might be able to fight cancer just like it would fight off something totally foreign like pig cells. Professor Zhao Yongxiang, a top scientist at Guangxi Medical University, led this exciting study. He came up with a clever trick—using the body’s own immune response to fight cancer. Normally, when a transplant fails, the body attacks the foreign organ. He wondered, what if we could make the body attack cancer the same way? To do this, his team took a harmless virus called Newcastle disease virus (NDV) and added a pig gene to it. This new virus, called NDV-GT, was then put into cancer cells. The pig gene made the body think the cancer was a foreign invader, just like a rejected transplant. The immune system went into attack mode, destroying the cancer cells completely.
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