Why didn't I think of that?

Mitosis, Meiosis, Cell/Pixabay

Great ideas, or Why didn't I think of that? relates as great ideas are often hidden in plain sight, something most appropriate when researchers decided to gin intense immune responses to previously hidden cancers by invoking a "tumor-to-pork" strategy intended to induce the body to take care of the offensive intrusion based on trickery of a different kind, 

In a groundbreaking moment for cancer, Chinese researchers turned the immune response provoked by organ transplants to fight the leading cause of death worldwide.

According to Columbia University’s Department of Surgery, 10-20% of patients who undergo transplant surgery will experience at least one rejection. However, researchers in China ingeniously turned that negative into a positive by directing that powerful impulse to attack cancer cells.

Called a “tumor-to-pork” strategy, a new study published in Cell earlier this year demonstrated immense success in engineering a virus that tricked the human body into believing that cancer cells were pig tissue, according to the South China Morning Post, thereby triggering a hyperacute inflammatory response. The virus began attacking the tumor with a staggering 90% success rate, to the point of curing a patient with advanced cervical cancer.

How cool is that?