News
Gold + Caffeine = A Treatment For Cancer?
This hypothesis sounds like an urban legend — but since it's from a scientific study, we'll consider buying it. According to the American Chemical Society's journal Inorganic Chemistry, several researchers have found that a caffeine compound mixed with gold could kill cancer cells. Angela Casini and Michel Piquet, the study's lead authors from the Netherlands' University of Groningen, have possibly discovered the only pleasant-sounding cancer treatment to ever exist.
Talk about sitting on a gold mine of research. But let's be clear: The hypothesis is very preliminary, as the study didn't use human patients — the two researchers just combined a gold-and-caffeine compound with human overian cancer cells in a laboratory. Still, here's what they unearthed (pardon the pun...)
- The researchers created seven caffeine-based gold compounds in the laboratory.
- They discovered the compounds could could kill human ovarian cancer cells without killing surrounding non-cancerous cells.
- But binge-drinking coffee should never be the answer, they warned, and neither is drinking Coke after Coke, because that might negatively affect non-cancerous cells.
So take this news with a grain of salt (or, ahem, coffee): Thus far, researchers have only killed a certain type of cancer cells that had already been isolated from a human body.
It's a little disappointing that curing cancer couldn't be as delightful as ordering a Chai Tea Latte from Starbucks and then sprinkling a little gold powder, but a possible step to treating cancer is always good news.
Otherwise, even though coffee isn't the cure to cancer, next time we're drinking a cup of pure black, we'll be tempted to throw in a little gold...