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For almost equally long every bit humans take been tooling around on planet world, cancer has been nipping at our heels…and brains, stomachs, kidneys, and and then on. The fossil tape indicates humanity'south embittered relationship with the disease extends even to prehistoric times. Over the centuries, cancer has proven a virtually intractable foe. I reason for this is that cancer is a big family unit, with numerous subtypes and categories, a veritable medusa'south head which immensely complicates finding a universal cure. A remedy for i cancer is no guarantee that it will piece of work confronting another type of cancer.

Worse, the treatments that work against multiple types of cancer like chemotherapy and radiation are oft so harsh and hazardous that doctors hesitate to prescribe them. Badly needed is a broad spectrum cancer cure that doesn't ruin the human torso in the procedure. Thanks to a research group studying malaria, such a cure now looks to be in the offing.

The story of this accidental discovery is important as much for what it says about the scientific process as the treatments it promises. The researchers, a grouping of Danish scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the University of British Columbia, were studying a malaria vaccine for  pregnant women when they stumbled across what appears to exist broad spectrum cancer cure in the grade of a modified malaria strain. The story is not without a heavy dose of irony, one of mankind'southward oldest foes, the Malaria virus, may contain the mechanism for curing an even worse nemesis – cancer.

Ali Salanti, one of the medical researchers behind the possible cancer cure

Ali Salanti, a researcher backside the possible cancer cure

"For decades, scientists have been searching for similarities between the growth of a placenta and a tumor," says Ali Salanti, who headed up one of the teams responsible for the discovery. "The placenta is an organ, which inside a few months grows from merely a few cells into an organ weighing approximately two pounds, and it provides the embryo with oxygen and nourishment in a relatively strange environment. In a style of speaking, tumors do much the same; they grow aggressively in a relatively foreign environs."

While studying the placenta, Ali Salanti noticed that a carbohydrate the malaria parasite attaches itself to in the placenta of pregnant women is identical to a carbohydrate establish in many cancers. It was but a small step from there to modifying a malaria strain, so that when it comes in contact with a cancer cell, it injects a toxin that destroys the cell. In this manner, the scientists believe they have effectively created a method for identifying a wide range of malignant cells in the trunk and eliminating them.

And so far, several rounds of animal tests take borne out their hypothesis, and a company called VAR2 Pharmaceuticals has been spun out of this enquiry to bring the therapy to market place. Despite what looks like rapid progress, information technology could accept roughly four years before human trials brainstorm.

Bated from the obvious tremendous benefit that would come from a wide spectrum cancer cure, these developments highlight some other nemesis to man health: the quantity of crimson tape institutions like the FDA foist upon anyone seeking to develop a new drug. A report published by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) pegs the toll of developing a prescription drug that gains market approval at $2.half-dozen billion. No pocket-size amount of this results from unnecessary blood-red tape, according to a 2012 report from the bourgeois remember tank The Manhattan Plant for Policy Research.

Evidencing just how problematic the issue has become, a study from the US Department of Health and Man Services examining barriers to drug development cited "Improvements in FDA review process efficiency" as one of the primary ways to bring downwards the soaring cost of drug evolution.

With 7.6 million people dying of cancer a year, in the four years it will likely accept to bring this cancer treatment to market, an estimated 30.4 million people will dice who might have been saved. If e'er there was a example for reforming the regulatory model governing drug evolution, this discovery of potential broad spectrum cancer cure would seem to brand it.