Vitamin A could turn out to be a new way to beat colon cancer, a preliminary study finds.

Colon cancer is the second deadliest cancer after lung cancer, killing about 49,500 men and women every year.

The main reason colon cancer is so deadly is because it is highly resistant to treatment but now a French research team thinks they may have discovered a new way to treat it.

Traditional treatments such as chemotherapy kills off most of the colon cancer cells, but the genetic mutations that caused the cancer in the first place may survive in a specific group of stem cells of the colon.  Following treatment, these surviving cancer cells can reappear, causing a relapse.

This study focused on a particular protein these cells are missing, called HOXA5. By blocking protein, the cancerous stem cells of the colon are allowed to grow uncontrollably, which causes the cancer to reoccur.

But by using vitamin A in mice, the researchers found they were able to activate the protein, which eliminated the cancer cells. B. They also got similar results in lab tests using tissue samples from actual colon cancer patients.

The researchers hope their discovery could lead to a new way to treat colon cancer, they said of the study, which appears in the current issue of Cancer Cell.