New research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has shattered the prevailing myth that chemotherapy drugs actually fight cancer. To the contrary, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, (UMA) found that these clinical poisons, though sometimes initially effective at stemming the growth and spread of existing tumor cells, eventually induce major stem cell damage that causes even more cancer.
Publishing their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team that worked on the project investigated how chemotherapeutics affect the body systematically by testing them out on fruit flies. According to an announcement about the study, scientists administered human-equivalent doses of chemotherapy drugs to Drosophila, a type of fruit fly, that had been spawned with a human cancer-causing gene, which activated in the flies' intestinal stem cells.