United States: As we are all familiar with a long list of health problems that COVID-19 infection brings, including a range of health problems, flu, and various respiratory and organ issues, the health experts note. However, new medical research also indicates that the virus could have a surprising effect on cancer.
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Published on Friday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the study revealed that COVID infection was associated with cancer regression, which means that the disease could be a starting point for new cancer therapies in the future.
COVID, the disease that has struck the world, is caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2, which consists of RNA, which is a molecule that is found in all cells of living organisms.
As per the study, RNA has been revealed to “trigger the development of a unique type of immune cell with anti-cancer properties,” said the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute in Chicago.
The newly created immune cells were able to get into the blood vessels and tumors – something that regular immune cells cannot do.
Moreover, “These killer cells then swarm the tumor and start attacking the cancer cells directly, helping to shrink the tumor,” said senior author Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine.
For severe COVID-19, this effect was found by the researchers, and specifically, efficacy against melanoma, lung cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer was noted.
“This discovery opens up a new avenue for cancer treatment,” Bharat added.
“It offers hope that we might be able to use this approach to benefit patients with advanced cancers who have not responded to other treatments,” he noted.
More research is needed
So far, a successful model has been achieved in animals.
As Bharat noted, “We are in the early stages, but the potential to transform cancer treatment is there,” Fox News reported.
“Our next steps will involve clinical trials to see if we can safely and effectively use these findings to help cancer patients,” he added.
Moreover, Dr. Marc Siegel, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and senior medical analyst, noted that as there is “not a cancer cure and was only seen in mice,” the study does offer an important output.
Moreover, Siegel added, “It reminds us that viruses cause inflammation and rev up the immune system, which can either increase your risk of certain cancers or, paradoxically, cause certain cancers to shrink by activating immune cells against them,” Fox News reported.
Centivax’s CEO, Dr. Jacob Glanville, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company, was also part of the study, but he concurred with the conclusions.
“There’s a known history of this phenomenon of ‘spontaneous regression’ following an infection with a high fever in multiple illnesses, dating back as far as doctors have been identifying cancer,” he added.
“Normally, the immune system can tell there’s something wrong with cancerous tissue, but cancers develop various mutations to hold the immune system back from attacking them,” Glanville continued.