By attaching a cancer-killer protein to white blood cells, Cornell biomedical engineers - led by Professor Michael King - have demonstrated the annihilation of metastasizing cancer cells traveling throughout the bloodstream.
King and his colleagues injected human blood samples, and later mice, with two proteins that stick to white blood cells, which are ubiquitous in the bloodstream. When a cancer cell comes into contact with white blood cells, the cancer cell essentially kills itself. Their research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 6, 2014.