Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees

Posted on February 7, 2008  Comments (1)

Honeybee Weapon in War on Cancer

No, researchers haven’t found a beehive-based cure (though major royal jelly, the wondrous protein concoction that turns lowly workers into queens, may have anti-cancer properties.) But bee colonies experience their own type of cancer, and maybe human researchers can learn from their victories.

Like Amdam said, it’s not clear how the honeybees won. Perhaps the successful colonies produced bees adapted to noticing the intruder; perhaps it produced individual bees whose interactions caused some sort of superorganism-wide shift. And maybe when we figure that out, we’ll have some fresh ideas for fighting cancer — maybe not for tweaking our own cells, but for customized nanomolecule cancer hunters.

Related: Leading Causes of DeathCancer Deaths, Not a Declining TrendVirus Found to be One Likely Factor in Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

One Response to “Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees”

  1. Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Using Spice-based Compound To Kill Cancer Cells
    August 19th, 2008 @ 8:06 am

    “So far, the molecule favored by the researchers has a nearly 100-fold difference in toxicity to cancer cells vs. healthy cells, meaning it takes 100 times more of the compound to kill a healthy cell than it does to kill a cancer cell…”

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