Medical researchers are working on a promising new medicine, an extract made of shark cartilage, which could be a cure for cancer!
Amazingly enough, one of the ocean's most fierce predators may soon help medical researchers find a cure for cancer. Studies have supplied significant evidence that an extract made from shark cartilage can shrink tumors.
Sharks have been around for a very long time, and are in fact one of the planet's oldest living animals. They have been swimming the waters of the world for over 400 million years. That means that they have been around for more than 100 million years before dinosaurs even appeared.
The shark is a type of fish, and it comes from the same family as do manta rays and skates. There are more than 50 different types of sharks swimming in our oceans today. They come in many different shapes and varying sizes, and can be as long as 50 feet, like the basking shark. They can be as small as 5 inches long, like the dwarf shark.
Sharks have no bones. Their skeletons are made totally of cartilage. Cartilage is the same spongy material that your nose and ears are made of, very pliable tissue.
Have you ever heard that sharks don't get cancer? Well, that is merely a myth, and it's not true. Sharks do not get bone cancer""because they have no bones-but they can still get certain other kinds of cancer. However, it is a fact that they don't get cancer nearly as often as human beings do, and their rate of recovery is much higher, especially given the fact that sharks don't go to the hospital to get treatment for their diseases.
The belief that sharks don't get cancer at all has been a popular cult story for years, and so the idea began to circulate that an extract made from a shark could cure cancer. Pills made from shark cartilage became a popular alternative medicine. However, the shark cartilage extract that you can buy over the counter has not been proven to be effective, and in fact, a blind study of this medicine actually proved it to have little or no value in the treatment of any kind of cancer in lab rats.
But something good did come of the mistaken belief that just consuming pills made of shark cartilage could cure cancer. Medical researchers became intrigued by the idea, and are now studying sharks. They believe that the sharks' ability to fight disease can teach us much about human sicknesses. Not only do they not often get cancer, sharks don't often get any kinds of illnesses. They have very simple immune systems that fight disease much better than humans' systems do. Medical researchers find this fact alone to be a good reason to study the way that shark immune systems work. But there is another, better reason that truly inspired the decision to study sharks as a means to finding a possible cure for cancer.
In the 1960s a doctor's research showed that cancers make a chemical factor that causes blood vessels to grow. Cancer cells need the increased blood flow that the growth of extra blood vessels provides, or the cancer cells will die. Scientists hypothesized that since cartilage has almost no blood vessels, it might produce a chemical that stops blood vessels from growing.
So doctors began studying sharks as a possible cure for cancer. Sharks have a lot of cartilage, and scientists thought that maybe their bodies produced a great deal of the chemical that blocks the growth of blood vessels. They set out to isolate this chemical, and they thought they might have done it. They tested their shark cartilage extract with a preliminary study on lab rats with brain tumors.
The study was a resounding success, and proved that a shark cartilage extract shrunk all of the brain tumors in the lab rats. Medical researchers actually found out that an extract made from shark cartilage shrinks all types of tumors. It causes blood vessels to shrink, which causes a lack of blood flow, which in turn starves the tumors and forces them to get smaller. Then, because they are smaller, the tumors are much easier to treat or control with a variety of other types of medicines.
The research on shark cartilage has been so promising that now a cancer drug based on shark extract is being studied by hospitals in both the USA and Canada. The drug comes from the backbone of the spiny dogfish. The dogfish is a very common kind of shark that is found in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.
Scientists are very hopeful that the new drug will work, and preliminary results are promising. Medical researchers believe that we can learn much about fighting illness from the study of the shark, and that in years to come these studies might help them in their battle to defeat cancer and other kinds of diseases.
