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Bee Venom Quickly KILLS Aggressive Breast Cancer Cells: Groundbreaking Australian Research
- Research Finds Bee Venom Kills Aggressive Breast Cancer Cells Within One Hour
- Other healthy cells are relatively intact by the bee venom in the system.
- Dr. Ciara Duffy also looked at whether the venom can work with chemotherapy.
Bee venom can kill aggressive breast cancer cells with minimal impact on healthy ones, according to new research.
Dr Ciara Duffy, from the Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research and the University of Western Australia, used venom from 312 bees for her study on cancer cells.
The bees, from Perth, Ireland and England, were tested for venom in aggressive cancers such as triple negative breast cancer, which has few treatment options.
The research, published in the NJP Nature Precision Oncology journal, showed that the venom destroyed these cells.
Bee venom can attack breast cancer cells with minimal impact on healthy ones, new research shows (file image)
Dr. Ciara Duffy (pictured) used venom from 312 bees and bumblebees for her research
Dr. Duffy said that a specific concentration of the venom kills cancer cells completely, while melittin can kill cells in just one hour.
Melittin, which causes pain in bee venom, was also found to reduce the chemical messages from cancer cells essential for growth and division in just 20 minutes.
Dr. Duffy said that no one had ever tested the impact of venom on cancer cells compared to normal cells before.
“We tested a very small positively charged peptide in bee venom called melittin, which we could reproduce synthetically, and found that the synthetic product reflected most of the anticancer effects of bee venom,” said Dr. Duffy.
‘We found that both bee venom and melittin significantly, selectively, and rapidly reduced the viability of triple negative breast cancer and HER2-enriched breast cancer cells.
“The poison was extremely powerful.”
Professor Peter Klinken, Western Australia’s chief scientist, said it was an exciting observation.
Dr. Duffy also tested whether melittin could be used with existing chemotherapy and found that it could work with chemotherapy used to treat aggressive breast cancer.
She revealed how she got involved in the investigation.
“I started by collecting Perth bee venom. Perth bees are among the healthiest in the world, ”he said.
Dr. Duffy said that no one has tested the impact of venom on cancer cells compared to normal cells before (stock image)
The bees were put to sleep with carbon dioxide and kept on ice before the venom barb was pulled out of the bee’s abdomen and the venom removed by careful dissection.
There are 20,000 species of bees in the world, but I wanted to compare the venom of the three countries.
‘I found that the European bee from Australia, Ireland and England had almost identical effects on breast cancer compared to normal cells. However, the bumblebee venom was unable to induce cell death even at very high concentrations, ” he said.
