Don't eat me, CD47

The "New drug could potentially shrink and cure all tumors" headline is a bit excessive, though the report is very interesting. Possible side effects will immediately occur to you.

The treatment uses an antibody that blocks the 'do not eat' signal that's usually displayed on tumor cells and coaxes the immune system to destroy cancer cells.

Leukemia cells produce higher levels of the CD47 protein than healthy cells. It's a marker that will block the immune system from destroying healthy blood cells. Cancers take advantage of this by using it to trick the immune system into ignoring them.

CD47 is found on every human primary tumor that the team has tested. The researchers transplanted human tumors into mice. Once the rodents were treated with anti-CD47, the tumors shrank and did not spread.

I don't understand their Figure 2A/B on survival rates with high and low CD47 tumors, which don't seem consistent, and not all the approaches gave statistically significant results.

And (drum roll please) the tumors were human tumors in mice (at least if I understand what "xenotransplantation" means). So once the "don't eat me" proteins were gone the mouse phages should be pretty good at getting rid of alien cells. The next test should be with mouse cancers, though that will be a longer study. And then long term studies to see what gets accidentally eaten during the treatment....