A drug that is used worldwide to treat malaria is now being tested as a treatment for cervical cancer. This surprising idea is the result of a new laboratory technique that could have far-reaching uses.

Our story starts with Dr. Richard Schlegel at Georgetown University Medical Center. He's best known for inventing the Gardasil vaccine to protect women from cervical cancer.

Schlegel wished he could take cancer cells from women who came to the hospital for treatment and grow them in the lab to learn more about this disease.
"People have tried growing cells in culture before, but they've been very crude experiments, essentially," he says. Most of these freshly collected cells die off quickly in the lab.

But Schlegel had an idea for a radically new method to grow all sorts of human cells. The secret to keeping them alive indefinitely is to grow them on a bed of cells that come from mice. These mouse cells have been blasted with radiation to prevent them from multiplying, and the culture is then treated with a compound (called a ROCK inhibitor) that regulates cell growth.