Presently, radiation and chemo are the only FDA approved cancer treatments however they both are not selective which cells they kill so this also takes out the immune system.

There's been a theory the immune system will kill cancer cells if the right conditions are met and the discovery in 2003 of an enzyme only found in cancer cells led to the creation of a drug that exploits this, which led to the discovery of of another occurring in tangerine peel (and strawberries, asparagus, plums and less in other things) that reacts with this enzyme to form a chemical that kills only the cancer cell while not harming normal cells.

The synthetic molecule, Abiraterone acetate, was eligible for patent, being man-made, but the one found in fruit was not able to be patented which makes it commercially uninteresting. The synthetic was worth getting FDA testing on ($100M est) while the second - if you can't patent it it's not worth sticking 100M into and if you don't get it tested by the FDA you can't say it kills cancer even if t does. Which it absolutely does.The synthetic molecule works on the CYP17 variant of a P450 Cytochrome enzyme which only occurs in prostate cancer cells, the one in fruit works on an enzyme common to all cancer cells named 1B1.

Refs: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6987200.stm http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/news/Private-hell-Leicester-scientist-searching-cancer-wonder-drug/article-1832255-detail/article.html http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F06%2F02%2FMNI11ORI84.DTL The Cytochrome P450 enzyme CYP1B1 [1] only occurs in cancer cells [2][3]. When certain phytoalexins such as resveratrol and salvestrol are ingested these phytoalexins are converted by the P450 enzyme into piceatannol [4], which is fatal to cancer cells but not human cells [5][6]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1B1 [2] http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/57/14/3026.short [3] http://secure.salvestrol.ca/secure/doc/isomtalk_schaefer2010.pdf [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piceatannol [5] http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v86/n5/abs/6600197a.html [6] http://www.orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2007/pdf/2007-v22n01-p039.pdf

So this story is really hard to figure out. First of all they omit any mention of this new way to kill cancer cells but suggest they've found a way to enhance it - which of course would be patentable.

It's like finding out vitamin C cures scurvy but trying to find a form of Vot C that works better so it can be patented.

If they can find a new synthetic compounds that react with the CYP1B1 enzyme to turn into something that only kills that cancer cell then they will have found a patentable cure to nearly all cancer (only 4/5 of people carry the Allele on Gene P53 that makes this work) and until then the one molecules that does this found in our food remains ineligible for patent.

The worse news is the chemical in question is made in the fruit in response to mold, and when we spray antifungals to prevent mold then because the plant never sees any it never gets to make this chemical in response to mold it never saw; production of this important plant sterol is reduced by up to 90% in sprayed produce.

If only for this organic food will give you all weird chemicals you paid for, sprayed fruit - not so much. This to my mind is similar to the rise in "infantile scurvy" when pasteurization of babies milk from 1890 on destroyed the vitamin C contributing to infant mortality until the 1930s when the definitive answer to scurvy was figured out.

We began sing antifungal sprays around 1900 and by WWII they were pretty much ubiquitous. Here's a graph of the rise of, in this case one kind of cancer in one country:

http://jonbarron.org/sites/default/files/cancer_trend_6.jpg

Ask people in their 80s how much cancer they heard of when they were kids. It was virtually unknown then and a doctor that died in 1940 of old age may never have seen a case and only heard of the disease that is today the second leading cause of death in the US today. The antifungals are also the chemicals that are killing the bees bats and all amphibians in the world. t us by fa the most disruptive chemical we've ever sprayed on the environment and is in my opinion the chemical equivalent to radiation, having similar mutagenic effects on, it would appear, all animal life.