The former dentist who experts say could be a walking cure for cancer
AFORMER dentist has been heralded as possibly holding the key to curing cancer. Father-of-four James Hull has been diagnosed over the past 10 years with stage three bowel cancer, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer and skin cancer, with doctors giving him little chance of survival.
But, somehow, the 59-year-old from Bassaleg, Newport, has beaten all of the odds by seeing off a number of different and progressively increasingly aggressive forms of the disease, and now medical specialists want to clone crucial parts of his body’s immune system to treat other sufferers.
According to one expert “cancer should be scared” of James’ white blood cells, or T-cells, which have not only identified and killed the disease in his own body but also behave in the same way against cancer cells taken from fellow sufferers.
And now James, who once established a successful chain of dental practices across the UK, is funding a nationwide research project into seeing if what’s making him resistant to attack could mean the end of the disease altogether.
“It started in 2010 when I started getting stomach problems, and ended up been rushed to hospital after I started vomiting faeces,” he says, adding that he ended up having emergency surgery to cut out a large intestinal tumour.
“I had to have the majority of my colon removed, along with associated lymph nodes to which the cancer had spread.
“Then, a year later, I had a malignant carcinoma on my pancreas.”
This tumour had already been growing for at least a year when it was finally spotted, and doctors couldn’t believe he had survived.
Indeed, they started noticing something altogether unusual in James’ biological make-up.
For example, when diagnosed with skin cancer in 2014, the lesions that had begun popping up on his arms in the months before started disappearing, without the need for surgery.
Elsewhere on his body, melanomas – initially thought to be malignant – surprised everyone by proving otherwise.
Most recently, 16 secondary tumours located in his liver have not only stopped growing but have also started to regress of their own accord.
Cancer, it would seem, is scared of James.
“They’re trying to find out what’s going on,” he smiles.
“Apparently, I am definitely not normal.
“At Cardiff University they’ve taken different tumours from different patients and my blood has destroyed the cancer in the lot of them.
“Professor Andrew Sewell texted me from the lab there to say, ‘Your cells cause carnage’.
“And, because I don’t have enough white blood cells to give everyone, they’re now attempting to clone them.
“The big question is whether or not they’ll still have the same cancer killing properties after they’ve been reproduced synthentically.”
So, via Continuum Life Sciences – a firm he set up in 2016 – James is dedicating himself to bring together some of the world’s top immunologists to find the answer to these questions.
Aside from Cardiff, researchers from Swansea, Surrey, Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham are undertaking non-invasive investigations of immune systems and tumour cells – the aim being to identify any unique features which could explain why patients like James remain so resistant to the disease.
“Just recently we’ve had over 4,000 calls from people with cancer who want to know more,” says James.
“We want those who’ve had similar illnesses to me to come forward and give blood. That way so we can compare it to what scientists have found in me.
“I don’t know if I’m unique or not – I just have to believe I have something inside that can help others, and I won’t stop until we find it.” ■