Cancer Cure? Eight-Year-Old Girl Suggests Antibiotics To Kill Cancer Cells – Tests Indicate She Could Be Right!

The cure for cancer may have been in front of our eyes all along, and a schoolgirl from Manchester, England, just had to spell it out.

Curing cancer may be as simple as treating a sore throat, eight-year-old Camilla Lisanti suggested while having a dinner conversation with her father, who is a cancer researcher, the Daily Mail reported.

Camilla suggested using antibiotics, "like when I have a sore throat," when her parent Michael Lisanti asked her how she would cure cancer.

Professor Lisanti and his wife, Federica Sotgia, were talking about their research over dinner when they decided to ask their daughter for her opinion.

"She has heard us talk about cancer a lot and we thought it would be fun to ask her what she thought about cancer therapy," said the professor.

"We asked her how she would cure cancer and she said, 'Mom and Dad, I would just use an antibiotic, like when I have a sore throat'."

And she might be right. Camilla's parents, a husband-wife cancer research duo, doubted their daughter's answer at first. But they were pleasantly surprised after testing out her theory in their laboratory at Manchester University.

Michael rubbed an antibiotic cream on a small growth on his face. When it disappeared, he found some reading that confirms Camilla's hunch.

Surprisingly, they found that some cheap and widely-used antibiotics were able kill even some of the most dangerous cancer cells. The antibiotics were found effective against seven of the most common cancers, including breast, prostate, lung and hard-to-treat brain tumors.

One antibiotic, doxycycline, is widely used to treat acne and looks promising. Its price tag: as little as 6 pence (about $0.09 USD) per day.

If antibiotics are indeed the cure for cancer, this will help people avoid breaking the bank as some of the most recent cancer drugs cost several hundred pounds per day. Professor Lisanti said antibiotics could be a safe one-size-fits-all treatment for cancer.

Some antibiotics stop cells from creating mitochondria, the tiny factories that supply the cells with energy.

According to Camilla's parents, cancer stem cells – "the deadly 'mother cells' that give birth to tumors, keep them alive and ease their spread around the body" – have a lot of mitochondria.

Four common antibiotics killed these stem cells in samples taken from breast, prostate, lung, ovarian, pancreatic, skin and brain cancers, while healthy cells were not harmed.

In the abstract of their study as featured in Oncotarget, the researchers said they "identified a conserved phenotypic weak point – a strict dependence on mitochondrial biogenesis for the clonal expansion and survival of cancer stem cells. Interestingly, several classes of FDA-approved antibiotics inhibit mitochondrial biogenesis as a known 'side-effect,' which could be harnessed instead as a 'therapeutic effect.'"

The experiments on cells in a dish suggested that antibiotics could be used to prevent cancer from spreading throughout the body.

However, Professor Lisanti still needs funding to test his theory on people, including people afflicted with breast cancer.

"This research makes a strong case for opening new trials in humans for using antibiotics to fight cancer. Many of the drugs we used were extremely effective, there was little or no damage to normal cells and these antibiotics have been in use for decades and are already approved by the F.D.A. for use in humans. However, of course, further studies are needed to validate their efficacy, especially in combination with more conventional therapies," he said, as quoted by an article in the website of the University of Manchester.

Dr. Matthew Lam, senior research officer at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: "The conclusions that the researchers have drawn, whilst just hypotheses at this stage, are certainly interesting. Antibiotics are cheap and readily available and if in time the link between their use and the eradication of cancer stem cells can be proved, this work may be the first step towards a new avenue for cancer treatment."

"This is a perfect example of why it is so important to continue to invest in scientific research. Sometimes there are answers to some of the biggest questions right in front of us but without ongoing commitment to the search for these answers, we'd never find them."

Camilla has been made an author of her parents' study to acknowledge her contribution.