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Researchers at Wake Forest University's Comprehensive Cancer Center, led by the Pathology Department's Zheng Cui and Mark Willingham, have bred a colony of mice that successfully fight off cancer.
Occasional, though rare, cases of spontaneous regression in human cancers have been seen and documented in the past, but no satisfactory explanations for this phenomenon have ever been put forward. While conducting a series of experiments with mouse sarcoma 180 (S180) cells, which form highly aggressive cancers in all normal mice, Dr. Cui and his colleagues happened upon a single mouse that surprised them with its ability to resist several forms of cancer, despite repeated injections of the sarcoma cells. Breeding the mouse produced offspring that also exhibited cancer resistance, suggesting a likely genetic link.
The cancer-fighting trait appeared to decline as the mice aged; six-week-old mice appeared to resist the cancer completely when injected with S180 cells, while the older mice were more likely to first develop cancer and only thereafter experience spontaneous regression. Further experiments showed that in these cases it was a massive infiltration of white blood cells that destroyed cancer cells in these mice without damaging normal, healthy cells.
Based on these results, Drs. Cui and Willingham and their colleagues suggest that a previously unknown immune response may be responsible for spontaneous regression.
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