A toxin included in bee venom could be used to fight against certain types of breast cancer: the triple negatives which are the most invasive.

If such a technique could not be used for about ten years, it remains an important discovery.

Is the bee the key to overcoming certain cancers?

The venom of this insect was already known to relieve rheumatism.

Australian researchers are now claiming it could destroy cancer cells in certain types of breast cancer.

It is the most aggressive cancers, the triple negatives, which are concerned.

Melittin, a miracle toxin?

It is not the venom itself, but one of its components, which would have this power: melittin.

This toxin, which causes pain at the time of the bite, is thought to be able to act on triple negative cancer cells which currently represent a quarter of breast cancers.

This is what

a team of researchers from the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research and the University of Western Australia say

in the journal 

Nature Precision Oncology 

.

Mahasti Saghatchian, an oncologist at the American hospital and at the Gustave-Roussy Institute, considers this discovery to be a very great hope.

"Triple negative breast cancer is the one on which our treatments today - radiotherapy, chemotherapy - do not work very well. It is the patients who relapse and die the most and so here we have the impression of touching a substance which would be a super-chemotherapy, in particular on these cancers ", explains the oncologist.

But this treatment is only at the preliminary stage and access to this treatment should not be considered for 7 to 10 years.