A Great Week for Our Fight against Cancer

This has been an exciting week for the people involved in the fight against cancer, and for the many patients who suffer from this terrible disease.

In the Institute Tejnión, which was built in the city of Haifa, a group of Israeli scientists discovered that cannabis can help block the growth of different kinds of tumors. These are preliminary results, but the researchers are extremely optimists and the potential applications are revolutionary. In fact, until today, cannabis was known for the way in which it can be used to counteract the worst side effects of chemotherapy, including sleeplessness, nausea and much more. However, the Israeli scientists have decided to give it a more important and decisive role, and have begun to study how the plant can be actively involved in the fight against cancer. Everything started one year ago, when professor Dedi Meiri, from the Faculty of Biology, decided to create a team to study the growth of both carcinogenic and healthy cells.

Dr. Meiri had already conceived the possibility, following the results of a previous study he conducted, that some of the chemicals contained in the cannabis plant could indeed push the cells of a brain tumor to a kind of self-destruction or suicide. This process is called apoptosis – a known phenomenon with an unknown trigger. We now know that cannabis could be one of the triggers, but we don’t know why and we don’t know how. It is obviously too early to call this a victory, the research is very recent and many more experiments will be needed to better understand and confirm the preliminary results. This said, what a great news this could be!

Another known aspect of the so-called apoptosis is that this is also the process through which our organism reacts and fights back whenever a tumor tries to grow. As a matter of fact, carcinogenic cells are not exactly unknown to our organism: they are byproducts of our body, which is therefore equipped to fight against them. Clearly enough, not all carcinogenic cells grow up to be tumors or cancers, precisely because way before they have the chance to do so they get destroyed by our own body. Even if the cancer is there, if the apoptosis gets activated the tumor will shrink. However, the process sometimes doesn’t get activated, for some mysterious reasons. Hoping that cannabis will help them in their fight.

Hopefully, science will soon help them too!