Did We Find the Holy Grail for Cancer?

A year ago, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), through their website: ScienceMag.org, is reported the of a discovery of a drug that can kill all tumors.

It breaks down like this:

There's a protein called CD47 that tells your immune system, "Don't eat me."

Our immune system patrols our bodies looking to find and destroy foreign biological entities.  And apparently, one of the ways that our immune system recognizes foreign vs. self is this CD47 protein.

The discoverer of CD47, Stanford biologist Irving Weissmann, found that normal cells express CD47, but that leukemia cells express CD47 in higher concentrations.

Some blood cancers have been cured with anti-CD47... an antibody that binds to CD47 thereby blocking this "Don't eat me" signal emitted by cancer cells.

But that's not the news.  According to Weissmann,

What we've shown is that CD47 isn't just important on leukemias and lymphomas. It's on every single human primary tumor that we tested.

You can read about the simple A/B experiments they did with anti-CD47, but the basic gist is that they've shown in vitro that anti-CD47 helps macrophages recognize cancer cells.

They have been able to cure cancer of all types from the feet of mice.

The only question remaining is whether or not this works in humans...