And it happened, they say, "accidentally."

A press release issued this week reads: Danish scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the University of British Columbia (UBC) face a possible breakthrough in the fight against cancer, which may result in a genuine medical treatment for the dreaded disease. The hunt for a weapon to fight malaria in pregnant women has revealed that, expressed in popular terms, armed malaria proteins can kill cancer. The researchers behind the discovery hope to be able to conduct tests on humans within four years.

Said Ali Salanti from the University of Copenhagen, "For decades, scientists have been searching for similarities between the growth of a placenta and a tumor. The placenta is an organ, which within a few months grows from only few cells into an organ weighing approx. two pounds, and it provides the embryo with oxygen and nourishment in a relatively foreign environment. In a manner of speaking, tumors do much the same, they grow aggressively in a relatively foreign environment."

In collaboration, the two university research groups have tested thousands of samples from brain tumors to leukemia's and a general picture emerges to indicate that the malaria protein is able attack more than 90% of all types of tumors. The drug has been tested on mice that were implanted with three types of human tumors. With non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the treated mice's tumors were about a quarter the size of the tumors in the control group. With prostate cancer, the tumors disappeared in two of the six treated mice a month after receiving the first dose. With metastatic bone cancer, five out of six of the treated mice were alive after almost eight weeks, compared to none of the mice in a control group.

"We have separated the malaria protein, which attaches itself to the carbohydrate and then added a toxin. By conducting tests on mice, we have been able to show that the combination of protein and toxin kill the cancer cells," Mads Daugaard explains.

"It appears that the malaria protein attaches itself to the tumor without any significant attachment to other tissue. And the mice that were given doses of protein and toxin showed far higher survival rates than the untreated mice. We have seen that three doses can arrest growth in a tumor and even make it shrink," PhD student Thomas Mandel Clausen elaborates. He has been part of the research project for the last two years. It would appear that the only snag is the fact that the treatment would not be available for pregnant women.

"Expressed in popular terms, the toxin will believe that the placenta is a tumor and kill it, in exactly the same way it will believe that a tumor is a placenta," Ali Salanti states.

In collaboration with the scientists behind the discovery, the University of Copenhagen has created the biotech company, VAR2pharmaceuticals, which will drive the clinical development forward. The research teams working with Ali Salanti and Mads Daugaard are now working purposefully towards being able to conduct tests on humans.

"The earliest possible test scenario is in four years time. The biggest questions are whether it'll work in the human body, and if the human body can tolerate the doses needed without developing side effects. But we're optimistic because the protein appears to only attach itself to a carbohydrate that is only found in the placenta and in cancer tumors in humans," Ali Salanti concludes.

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