Once certain cellular machinery detects that a cell is changing into cancer, it triggers the kill code to destroy the mutating cell.
The code is found in large protein-coding ribonucleic acids (RNAs) and in small microRNAs, which are thought to have evolved more than 800 million years ago, partly to protect against cancer.
The Northwestern University researchers say the toxic microRNAs are also induced by chemotherapy.
Cancer does not have the ability to adapt to or become resistant to the toxic RNAs, making it potentially fail safe if the code can be duplicated artificially.
