Not so long ago, people had trouble even saying the word. They whispered it, with a shudder, or simply called it the C-word.

Treatments have come a long way from the days when a cancer diagnosis was a near-certain death sentence. Survival rates have dramatically increased in recent decades for many types of the disease.

Still, cancer remains fearsome and has resisted all attempts to eradicate it.

Now researchers at Waless Cardiff University have made a surprising discovery about the immune system they believe could lead to a pan-cancer cure. Their work indicates that a newly identified T-cell in the blood can be genetically modified, or reprogrammed, to kill a large variety of cancers without harming healthy tissue.

As the researchers put it in a peer-reviewed paper in Nature Immunology: the targeting of cancer cells would allow immune destruction of malignancies in all individuals.

Thats right -- all individuals.

It raises the prospect of a one-size-fits-all cancer treatment, a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population, Cardiff University professor and lead author Andrew Sewell said in a university statement this week.

He added:

Previously nobody believed this could be possible.

Cancer experts not involved in the research say this is indeed an exciting development, with one calling it a transformative new finding. But they caution its early days. The process has been tested in the laboratory and in animals but not yet in humans.

At the moment, University of Manchester immunology professor Daniel Davis told the BBC, this is very basic research and not close to actual medicines for patients.

Whats unique about this newly discovered T-cell, Cardiff University said in a statement about the research, is that it sports a receptor that can recognize many types of cancer through a molecule called MR1 that, unlike previously known cell-surface molecules, does not vary in the human population -- meaning it is a hugely attractive new target for immunotherapies.

Sewell acknowledges there are plenty of hurdles to overcome, but he says the T-cell discovery opens up an exciting new frontier in the fight against cancer.

Read the research in Immunology Nature.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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