New chemistry could cure human cancers when funding is
secured
Cancer painfully ends more than 500,000 lives in the United
States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The scientific crusade against cancer recently achieved a victory under the
leadership of University of Missouri Curators’ Professor M. Frederick
Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s team has developed a new form of radiation therapy that
successfully put cancer into remission in mice. This innovative treatment
produced none of the harmful side-effects of conventional chemo and radiation
cancer therapies. Clinical trials in humans could begin soon after Hawthorne
secures funding.
“Since the 1930s, scientists have sought success with a
cancer treatment known as boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT),” said
Hawthorne, a recent winner of the National Medal of Science awarded by
President Obama in the White House. “Our team at MU’s International Institute
of Nano and Molecular Medicine finally found the way to make BNCT work by
taking advantage of a cancer cell’s biology with nanochemistry.”