- Cannabis may have uses in cancer treatment. Researchers
have used the main active ingredient in the drug to treat brain tumours
in rats.
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- The type of tumour, a glioma, is relatively uncommon
but fatal in humans. Dr Ismael Galve-Roperh and his team at Complutense
University, Madrid, infused tetrahydrocannibinol (THC) into the rats' brains
through tubes.
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- In a third of the rats, the tumour was eliminated. Another
third lived for an extra six weeks instead of dying within two to three.
Another third gained no benefit.
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- The team reports in Nature Medicine that the treatment
works by stimulating the cancer cells to commit suicide in a natural process
called apoptosis. The effect occurs in cancer cells but not in normal ones
and, they say, "could provide the basis for a new therapeutic approach
for the treatment of malignant gliomas".
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