The cure for cancer could be in the offing if inborn anti-cancer factors already inside the human body are restored to function.

These factors actively work to identify and clear away cancer cells, researchers claim. They are lost at birth, weakening people's cancer defences.

Zhang Yaochuan, a Chinese scientist and director of the Biological Chemistry Research Institute at Zhejiang University in East China, said his findings on human gestation could be of great value in anti-cancer research.

Zhang and his colleagues have spent years probing cancer.

He claimed complete genetic information is released and inherited during the period during which a human embryo, formed by the combination of a sperm and an ovum, evolves to be a 3,000 to 3,500 gram baby within the short period of nine months.

Zhang said he found evidence that cancer genes are active at the same level in an embryo as other normal genes that promote the development of non-cancerous cells.

The embryo keeps the normal cells but automatically checks the growth of cancer genes, he alleged. This purportedly confirms the existence of anti-cancer factors, which can differentiate cancer cells from normal cells and can also curtail cancer cell development.

Zhang said each of the 100,000 factors in an embryo is a genetic valve involved in certain diseases. In the embryonic stage, all genetic valves are open and unblocked with keys.

These keys are lost one by one as a person matures, the researcher claims. The problem could be resolved by finding the keys that avert these problems during foetal development, Zhang said.

Cancer cells are groups of variant cells that multiply rapidly, but they don't divide nearly as fast as cells do during the embryonic stage.

This suggests that a highly efficient management system is at work then to ensure only good cells are made.

Why this is so is not understood by modern science, Zhang said.

Zhang's theory is that this system could be reactivated and controlled to stop cancer cell development without harming the body.

That would provide treatment for cancer or tumors that are less painful and disruptive than chemotherapy, which destroys normal cells and tissue as well as cancer-ridden parts.

Zhang was the first scientist in China to use silkworm embryos to develop biologically active factor products.

Zhang also has developed biologically active protein by using embryos of chickens and testing it on rats and monkeys.

Those test results show a way of increasing the number of white blood cells, prolonging life and lifting the quality of life for test animals.

(Xinhua News Agency October 23, 2001)