Melanoma: Outsmarting the Devilish Cancer Cell

By Shlomo Maital

Carmit Levy

Dr. Carmit Levy

     Despite countless billions of dollars in research funds, cancer continues to take its toll. The principle therapy continues to be chemotherapy, which by brute force poisons cancer cells and barely leaves other cells mostly unharmed.   Is it time to rethink?

       Tel Aviv University researcher Dr. Carmit Levy, together with an international team of researchers, including those from Germany’s Heidelberg Univ., have come up with breakthrough findings for skin cancer (melanoma) which kills one person every 52 seconds in the world, or some 90,000 people annually. Their findings are to be published in a leading scientific journal. Levy has just returned to Israel after a stay at Harvard.

         The team found that cancer cells begin in the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin, which has no blood vessels. Without blood and the nourishment it brings the cancer cannot spread (metastasize). So – it needs to penetrate the dermis, the skin layer below the epidermis, which does have blood vessels. But the dermis has immune cells that kill the cancer. How can the cancer cell invade enemy territory and survive?

     Simple. It sends out tiny nano-bubbles, with genetic material, that alter cells in the dermis and make them friendly for invasion. (Perhaps, like the Vichy France government that welcomed the Nazis in World War II). The melanoma, with its new blood supply, is now set to spread through the body and in many cases, kill the body itself.

   This discovery may make it possible to neutralize those tiny nano-bubbles, and keep them from preparing a friendly invasion site.   If melanoma can be stopped from metastasizing, the localized cancer can be removed in simple surgery. This is now the goal of the Levy team.

     It continues to amaze me, how evolution has enabled cancer cells to adapt, creating incredible complex mechanisms to defeat the body’s immune system, which itself has evolved and is exceptionally powerful and sophisticated. This is an endless war of escalation, in which cancer so far has had the upper hand. Thanks to Dr. Levy, perhaps we can gain some ground.