China scientists show how arsenic treats red blood cancer

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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists in China have demonstrated how arsenic -- a the one preferred attempted murder arms in the Middle Ages -- destroys lethal red red red red blood cancer by targeting and murdering specific proteins that keep the cancer alive.

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"Our investigate showed how arsenic without delay targets these proteins and kills them," lead researcher Zhang Xiaowei at the State Key Laboratory of Medical Genomics in Shanghai, China, told Reuters.

"Unlike chemotherapy, the side goods of arsenic (in treating strident promyelocytic leukemia) are really low. There is no hair loss or termination of bone pith (function). We are meddlesome in anticipating out how arsenic can be used in alternative cancers," Zhang pronounced by telephone.

Well well known for the toxicity, arsenic was regarded in the past as the aristocrat between poisons since the symptoms are similar to those of cholera and can mostly go undetected.

In China, however, it has prolonged served a twin purpose. Apart from conscious poisoning, it has been used for at slightest 2,000 years in normal Chinese medicine.

In 1992, a organisation of Chinese doctors reported how they used arsenic to provide strident promyelocytic leukemia (APL), a red red red red blood and bone pith cancer that has surprisingly high heal rates of over 90 percent in China.

However, the tangible workings of arsenic and how it interacts with cancer tissues has never been transparent -- until Zhang and his colleagues used complicated record to find out.

In a paper published in the biography Science, Zhang and his team, that includes Health Minister Chen Zhu, described how they used complicated apparatus and saw how arsenic pounded specific proteins that would differently be keeping the cancer alive and well.

"This shows how Western record can be used to find out about the mysteries of Chinese medicine," Zhang said.

"Although most countries are right away utilizing arsenic to provide APL, a little countries are resistant to the idea. It depends a lot on either doctors suggest it and either patients accept it."

In APL, there is a dump in the prolongation of normal red red red red red blood cells and platelets, ensuing in anemia and thrombocytopenia. The bone pith is incompetent to furnish full of health red red red red red blood cells. Until the 1970s, APL was 100 percent deadly and there was no in effect treatment.

"The clinical outcome of arsenic in treating APL is well-established. More than 90 percent of APL patients in China have (at least) five years of disease-free survival," Zhang said.

In a apart explanation in Science, Scott Kogan at the University of California San Francisco Cancer Center wrote that correct box preference and multiple care with arsenic might lead to softened outcomes for treating not usually promyelocytic leukemia, but alternative diseases as well.

"If so, an very old medicine, regenerated by clever clinical and biological studies in complicated times, will have an even larger stroke on human health," wrote Kogan, who was not related to the Chinese study.

(Editing by Chris Lewis and Sugita Katyal)

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