This ultra gay cancer breakthrough is as raunchy as it is unexpected

When it comes to cancer, new breakthroughs are being made all the time, thanks to hard-working scientists trying to find cutting-edge treatments even in some of the most unlikely places.

And honestly? It doesn’t get much unlikelier than a Grindr hook-up gone wrong. But somehow, that’s the inspiration for a new retinal cancer treatment that apparently works really well in early animal trials.

TikToker Dr. Cal has a PhD in genetic medicine, and her (extremely accessible) channel exists to explain certain medical breakthroughs to laypeople who aren’t used to reading medical journals and dissecting heavy science speak. She does an amazing job of turning complex new breakthroughs into easy-to-understand concepts that anyone can understand.

In her latest video, Cal tells us about a new treatment that seems almost too bizarre to be real: a drop of jizz in the ol’ eyeball.

How about we take this to the next level?

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Apparently, catching some sperm in your eye isn’t just a horrible thing that can happen during drag legend Miss Coco’s cautionary dating tale in Trick: “honey, it BURNS!”

Burn it might, but according to Dr. Cal, that’s potentially the very reason the treatment works.

As the good doctor explains, our eyeballs are completely sealed spheres, which makes it difficult (not to mention painful!) to receive medicine in that extra-sensitive area. To make matters even more complicated, our eyeballs are packed with immune cells that make it harder for eyedrop medications to actually penetrate the surface and treat whatever’s wrong. It’s for a good reason: since our eyes are pretty evolutionarily important, we need extra immunity there. But it makes it that much harder to actually get medicine in there that isn’t pushed out by that immunity barrier.

Until now, apparently. To treat the eye, “we need some biological material that is very, very good at actively penetrating through tough barriers,” Dr. Cal explains.

Enter the humble spermatozoa, a DNA “packet” whose entire job (evolutionarily speaking) is to find an egg and fertilize it, immune systems be damned. But the egg is well protected, and not just anything’s going to penetrate its strong barrier. Which is why semen is covered in exosomes, a material that helps get sperms exactly where they need to go. Basically, eggs try to hold a strong defense against semen, but semen shows up and says “it’s going down, I’m yelling timber,” and that’s how babies are made.

In a trial from earlier this year, scientists took exosomes derived from samples of pig semen to treat a test group of mice with retinal cancer with chemotherapy.

“It worked, like, crazy well,” says Dr. Cal. “The tumors in the mice that got the pig jizz were less than 5% of the size of the tumors in the mice that didn’t.”

You can get exosomes out of other materials, but hilariously enough, these scientists went with jizz, and the jizz absolutely kicked eye cancer’s a**. Who knew!?

As you can imagine, this is pretty exciting news for anyone who’s had to inject medicine into their eyeballs before—an excruciatingly painful process that no one should ever have to go through. Thanks to this experiment, even the toughest eye cancer might be able to be treated with a handy eyedropper full of… man juice.

Does that mean that a dose of jizz in the eye won’t still burn like hell? Not a chance! But some things are worth it for science. What other science miracles can semen perform? I think I can speak for the entire community when I say we’re going to do whatever it takes to find out.

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