A new treatment for cancer gets cancerous cells to self destruct, a breakthrough that could revolutionize how patients are treated.

The problem with cancer cells is they don’t kill themselves when they are no longer useful, unlike healthy cells — instead, they grow into tumors. However, scientists at the UCL Cancer Institute may have fixed this in lung cancer cells by essentially reprogramming them, according to a report from the Mirror.

Scientists used a combination of two drugs, a CDK9 inhibitor and TRAIL, which allowed them to change the cells’ programming and force them to self-destruct. The researchers used lung cancer cells and mice.

Researchers will present the drug combination at the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Conference in Liverpool next week. Scientists downplayed the advances, saying that it was still in very early stages.

Professor Henning Walczak from the UCL Cancer Institute, the lead researcher on the project, said that discovering a way to get cancer cells to self-destruct while leaving healthy cells intact could “pave the way” to better treatment approaches. The next step for the team will to see how it works with other types of cancer.

Neil Barre, senior science informatoin manager at Cancer Research UK, said the findings build on progress made into understanding how cancer cells keep themselves alive. Understanding that process will better enable scientists to develop new methods to attack them.

He said there was an “urgent need” to save more lives from lung cancer, and that the finding present a real possibility that effective new treatments can be developed to help lung cancer patients — and possibly patients who suffer from other forms of cancer.