Cancer impacts so many lives; this writer knows five people who are personally battling the disease and she lost her uncle to pancreatic cancer in 2014. But Japanese researchers may have just made an incredible breakthrough in fighting the disease, finding a way to get cancer cells to undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death — and it may be a major step forward in curing some types of cancer.
Apoptosis is essential for normal cell development, the maintenance of tissues, and in preventing cancer. It's a natural, highly-regulated process in which a cell self-destructs when it's damaged, no longer needed, or potentially harmful to the body. Unlike necrosis — cell death caused by disease or injury — apoptosis doesn't cause inflammation.
Using carbon monoxide, Japanese researchers have figured out how to trigger apoptosis as well as the suppression of cancer cell growth and mild cytotoxicity (capacity of a substance, chemical, or immune cell to damage or destroy living cells) in cancer cells only, while healthy cells remain untouched.
Japanese scientists just made cancer cells kill themselves from the inside.
— Gina Beana Fofina (@Ginasassyass) October 25, 2026
They used the excess carbon monoxide tumors already produce + a catalyst to generate the killing compound inside the cancer cells only.
Healthy cells stay untouched.
Early lab results, but this is the… pic.twitter.com/CO6ViOCK7F
These are very early results and more research is needed, but this is a selective approach to cancer treatment that medicine has been chasing.
For cancer treatment to be the most effective, it must kill the cancer without producing harmful side effects. For traditional chemotherapies, the side effects may end up being just as harmful as the cancer. Tanaka and like-minded researchers are trying to improve treatments by devising new technologies that selectively target tumors. At RIKEN, rather than injecting the body with cancer-killing drugs, Tanaka’s goal is to eventually inject patients with harmless compounds that can be used to make drugs on the fly after they are picked up by cancer cells.
Most of us know about carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas commonly produced by the burning of gasoline in car engines. Recently, research has shown that many types of cancer cells also produce this gas. This makes carbon monoxide a kind of cancer biomarker, but only if it can be detected. In the newly published experiments, scientists in the Biofunctional Synthetic Chemistry Laboratory at RIKEN PRI tested a system for bringing a metal catalyst into cells and then using it and excess carbon monoxide to make a toxic bioactive compound. Because cancer cells have excess carbon monoxide and healthy cells do not, only the cancer cells are exposed to the cytotoxic drug.
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The researchers tested this system at many stages. First, they screened a collection of palladacycles to find the one that yielded the most phenanthridinone. Next, they incubated the albumin–palladacycle complex for 48 hours with human liver, cervix, breast, or lung cancer cell lines, as well as with a non-cancerous cell line. After the 48 hours, they detected the desired product in the cancer lines, but not in the normal cells. This showed both that the complex protected the catalyst from glutathione and that targeting was successful – the reaction only occurred in the cancer cells. A few adjustments ensured that the product would detach from the complex and freely move about the cell.
Once this was confirmed, they tweaked the albumin–palladacycle complex so that the reaction produced a specific kind of phenanthridinone that is highly toxic and used in anti-cancer drugs. When tested in the liver cancer cell line, they observed the drug being produced inside the cells, which subsequently suffered from the toxic drug’s effects.
Carbon monoxide in blood was a potential concern as accidentally triggering production of the toxic in blood during transport would kill the blood cells before it arrived at the target location. However, when tested, blood remained free of the drug, presumably because carbon monoxide in blood is bound to hemoglobin, making it unavailable for the reaction.
This is borderline miraculous. In most contexts, carbon monoxide is deadly — most homes have carbon monoxide detectors. But when used to target cancer cells, it helps trigger apoptosis without harming healthy cells.
JUST IN: Japanese scientists force cancer cells to kill themselves in new experiments
— Kalshi (@Kalshi) October 25, 2026
Researchers targeted four types of cancer cells: liver cancer (HepG2), breast cancer (MCF7), cervical cancer (HeLa S3), and lung cancer (A549). There's potential for this to work on other types of cancer as well.
Having cancer cells commit seppuku might be the most Japanese thing ever.
— shaquille o'atmeal (@crypt0e) October 25, 2026
The major problem with traditional chemotherapy and radiation treatments is they damage other, healthy cells. And while modern radiation techniques have become more precise, they work by damaging cellular DNA, which cancer cells are less capable of repairing.
Right now, the research was done only on laboratory-grown cancer cells and not in patients. The next step will be animal testing, before human trials can begin. But this signals hope for cancer patients and their loved ones.
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