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Chinese scientists turn tumours into ‘pork’ in radical cancer treatment
Researchers in China have used the body’s own immune system to kill cancerous cells in a pioneering new therapy
Shi Huang
Published: 12:00pm, 17 Mar 2025
Updated: 12:47pm, 17 Mar 2025
Scientists have turned the same immune response that rejects organ transplants to their advantage – to target cancer.
In a trailblazing fusion of immunology and ingenuity, a team of Chinese researchers have been engineering tumours to mimic pork, thereby triggering the body’s immune system to attack them with unprecedented precision.
Their pioneering study, published in the journal Cell on January 18, uses a genetically modified virus to “disguise” cancer cells as foreign pig tissue, sparking a hyperacute immune rejection response that attacks the tumours while leaving healthy cells untouched.
Early clinical trials report staggering success: 90 per cent of patients with advanced, treatment-resistant cancers – such as liver, ovarian and lung – achieved halted tumour growth or shrinkage, with one cervical cancer patient declared clinically cured.
By repurposing a mechanism that is notorious for organ transplant rejection, this “tumour-to-pork” strategy has opened a new frontier in the fight against cancer, offering hope where conventional therapies have failed.
The study, led by Professor Zhao Yongxiang, director of the State Key Laboratory of Targeting Oncology, Guangxi Medical University, is now trending on China’s social media.
Hyperacute inflammatory response is a severe adverse reaction that can result in an inflammatory storm within the body, ultimately leading to transplant failure. As an immunologist and surgeon, Zhao wondered if there was a way to harness this immune response and direct it instead to attack tumours.
Using the Newcastle disease virus (NDV), which typically only causes mild to no symptoms in humans, as a vector the scientists inserted a gene derived from pigs to make the novel NDV-GT virus.
After infecting the tumour cells, the virus induced the specific expression of the xenogeneic antigen on the surface of the tumour, which in turn triggered the hyperacute immune rejection response.
The team began with a series of trials on animal subjects.
Monkeys with liver cancer that received intravenous NDV-GT treatment had an average of more than six months’ survival, compared with control groups of monkeys, which had only four months.
Three months after stopping treatment, the researchers found that all the tumours had completely disappeared in the treatment group. All monkeys in the treatment group also survived for a long time.
Cancer researchers have been intrigued by the unusual approach.
“I’m very hopeful,” molecular virologist Masmudur Rahman at Arizona State University told Nature News. “But cancers are highly variable diseases, and further work is needed to investigate who is most likely to benefit from this treatment,” he said.
After the animal trials, Zhao and his team moved on to human patients.
They recruited a total of 23 patients with advanced, drug-resistant tumours who had been deemed untreatable, and gave them weekly intravenous and intraperitoneal infusions for eight to 12 weeks.
In one 58-year-old patient with stage-four cervical cancer, after three months of the treatment, scans showed a significant reduction or complete disappearance of bone metastatic lesions and pelvic metastatic lymph nodes.
By the time the paper was submitted in February 2024, she had survived more than 36 months, significantly longer than other patients with advanced metastatic cervical cancer.
Another patient, also with stage-four cervical cancer, achieved complete remission – a clinical cure – while six patients experienced partial remission, where their tumours shrank.
At the end of the clinical trial, of the 20 evaluable patients, 18 showed no tumour growth after treatment.
There were only a few adverse events from the NDV-GT therapy. Researchers showed through PCR testing that the virus persisted in the blood on the seventh day after each infusion, indicating good therapeutic durability.
“Currently, phase 2 to 3 clinical trials for diverse malignancies are under application, marking progress in NDV-GT’s clinical development by evaluating efficacy and safety,” Zhao said. “It could be an anti-tumour drug with significant clinical translation potential for advanced cancer patients.”
Shi Huang
Senior Reporter, China
