Ever since chemotherapy was introduced into the practice of western medicine, doctors and oncologists have been trying to answer this nagging question: Why does chemotherapy seem to work at first, but then cancer tumors cells grow back even more aggressively while the body becomes resistant to chemotherapy?

It turns out that chemotherapy damages healthy cells, causing them to secrete a protein that accelerates the growth of cancer tumors. (http://ca.news.yahoo.com/chemotherapy-backfire-boost-cancer-growth-st…)

This protein, dubbed “WNT16B,” is taken up by nearby cancer cells, causing them to “grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy,” said Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He’s the co-author of the study that documented this phenomenon, published in Nature Medicine.