Rare bacterium product snips cancer DNA:

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-rare-byproduct-marine-bacteria-cancer.html#ajTabs

Another avenue of attack for cancer!

Originally posted by sonhouse
http://phys.org/news/2014-05-rare-byproduct-marine-bacteria-cancer.html#ajTabs

Another avenue of attack for cancer!

but it doesn't say its specificity i.e. how selectively it kills/damages cancer cells rather than normal cells. If it doesn't have much specificity, it would most likely have horrible side effects like other cancer drugs and thus would probably not be much better than the others that already are used. The only thing I see going for it at the moment is that, unlike many other cancer drugs, it is cheap. But, without much specificity, that wouldn't help much. What is needed is a cancer drug that has so much specificity that you can have just a single one-time big dose of it and it will kill all the cancer without side effects (because of the high specificity ) and then, because you only need just one dose and that's it, the price per gram would probably not be too much of an issue unless the price is something completely ridiculous of course!

But the first truly reliable cancer treatment without side effects to eventually pan out in the near-future may not be simply a drug but a complex delivery system, possibly using nanoparticles or a modified virus, that selectively delivers some genes and/or very short-lived drugs (short-lived so that they are deactivated before they have time to defuse into non-cancerous cells ) ONLY to the cancer cells and leaves normal cells alone and in this way has no side effects.

Basically, killing the cancer is always the easy part. There are many substances that would do it. The hard part is not killing the patient as well as the cancer or creating side effects so terrible that the patient would actually prefer the cancer. That has always been the problem.

Originally posted by humy
but it doesn't say its specificity i.e. how selectively it kills/damages cancer cells rather than normal cells. If it doesn't have much specificity, it would most likely have horrible side effects like other cancer drugs and thus would probably not be much better than the others that already are used. The only thing I see going for it at the moment is that, unl ...[text shortened]... so terrible that the patient would actually prefer the cancer. That has always been the problem.

Like kill the cancer with a chainsaw🙂