Fighting Cancer With Sugars

According to this article, a team at Johns Hopkins University, led by Srinivasa-Gopalan Sampathkumar and Kevin J. Yarema, recently had a paper published in Chemistry & Biology, in which they discuss a short-chain fatty acid compound they developed, which kills cancer cells, without the need for radiation or the normal style of toxic chemotherapy.

So far no experiments have been performed on animals or humans; all of the research has been done in glassware. However, the results look promising.

In case you'd like to track down the original paper, it has the alluring title "Targeting Glycosylation Pathways and the Cell Cycle: Sugar-Dependent Activity of Butyrate-Carbohydrate Cancer Prodrugs".