Pregnancy hormone knocks out Kaposi's sarcoma.(beta chorionic gonadotropin)

A hormone produced during the early stages of pregnancy kills Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) cells but does not affect normal cells.

These new findings - which appear to offer a novel treatment strategy for one of the most feared sequelae of AIDS - were published in the journal Nature (1995;64(6526):64-8) by researchers Yanto Lunardi-Iskandar et al. of Robert C. Gallo's Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in cooperation with colleagues at the Gynecology and Obstetric Medical Center, Paris, France; the Free University of Brussels, Belgium; and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The hormone is the beta chain of human chorionic …