Researchers found that the mice who received no treatment for their tumours died about 30 days into the study.

Mice who received the nanotubes alone or laser treatment alone survived for a similar length of time. However, the group that received the highest dose of such nanotubes, the tumours completely disappeared in 80 percent of the mice.

Many of those mice continued to live tumour-free through the completion of the study, which was about nine months later.

'You can actually watch the tumours shrinking until, one day, they are gone,' Torti said.

Before the treatment can be tested in humans, however, studies need to be done to test the toxicity and safety, looking to see if the treatment causes any changes in organs over time, as well as the pharmacology of the treatment, looking at things such as what happens to the nanotubes, which are synthetic materials, over time.

The study appeared in the August issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.