Has China found a cure for cancer in malaria?
- Doctors warn public not to get overexcited or feed into irrational hype as scientist’s claim goes viral
- ‘Not enough evidence to prove this method is useful yet,’ research team co-leader cautions
A scientist’s claim that a malaria parasite shows promise as a cancer treatment has China’s social media users in a frenzy, even as scientists and doctors warn cancer patients not to get overexcited about the claim or to feed into what they call irrational hype.
Chen Xiaoping, a drug researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said in a speech at a forum to promote science late last month that the research team he leads had found that the parasite, plasmodium, might offer a cure for cancer.
When that statement went viral on the internet, tens of thousands of comments flooded Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service. Many of the commenters called the news a breakthrough and wanted the researchers’ contact information.
Chen had said that of the 10 cancer patients who had taken part in a trial of plasmodium as a cancer cure and been observed by researchers for over a year, five had shown “obvious treatment results”, including two who “probably recovered”. The experiment failed to help the rest, with two patients dying.
Infecting a patient with plasmodium helped activate the immune system to battle tumour cells, Chen said, adding that the team has yet to publish any papers on its research.
