BIG SLEEP ‘CAN BEAT THE BIG C’

Hibernation stops tumours growing

DOCTORS hope to be able to cure terminal cancer patients by putting them into a deep sleep, after experiments on animals proved successful.

Hibernation may protect patients’ bodies against the toxic effects of radiotherapy and stop tumours growing.

In those with advanced cancer, where the disease has spread around the body, surgery to remove growths is not possible.

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are of little use as the high doses needed to beat the cancer would be fatal. But Italian scientists found putting rats into hibernation protects them from the effects of radiation, so they can be treated with higher doses. And they think the method will work on humans within a decade.

More than 150,000 people die of cancer in the UK every year, mostly because the disease has spread through the body.

Prof Marco Durante, of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, said: “Around 50% of cancer patients have advanced cancer. They have multiple metastasis [secondary growths] in the body. You cannot use surgery to remove the cancer or do radiation in all the affected parts, or you will kill the patients trying to destroy the cancer.

“But if you could put the patient into synthetic torpor [hibernation] you could stop the cancer growing.

“You also increase radioresistance, so you can treat all the different metastases without killing the patient.”

Speaking at the American Association For The Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, Prof Durante added: “You wake up the patients and they are cured. “If this approach works, many patients with multiple metastases will have hope.” Prof Durante’s team put rats into a deep sleep and reduced their body temperature to 14C. The trials show hibernation reduces the toxicity of radiation by around 40%. Scientists think deep sleep boosts the body’s ability to repair damaged DNA.