Hard to tell. The cynical response is that the novelty is that it's coming from Stanford. The perhaps more correct response is that the novelty is the mechanism of triggering the apoptosis and the specificity.

Here's a paper from 2018 that discusses the prospect of using apoptosis for cancer treatment. They even talk about BCL-2.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5855670/

Triggering the automatic cell death on demand, instead of a period of time, i.e. apoptosis, sounds pretty smart and novel.

After 7 years all of our cells die and regenerate, but using biochemistry and some endogenous proteins glued together to control that period of time, i haven't heard about it before.

Not a medical expert, but cancers have a vast number of variations in the type of the cancer cell they create, but one common characteristic of all cancers is that they are derived from our own cells. So they should respond to some "commands" our own cells follow.

Inducing apoptosis for cancer prevention and treatment is old news though. Fasting, water fasting that is, causes apoptosis of cells en mass and has proven to be very effective in minimizing radiotherapy or chemotherapy sessions, and even a total treatment. Instead of doing 20 chemotherapy sessions, reducing it down to 1 or 2 and the cancer is gone.

Anyway, someone doing the same using a biochemical pathway and light up gene expression, is pretty novel.

It’s due to the phrase “self destruct.”

For some reason people who write headlines like using this in the context of cancer cells.

First noticed it in 2010 when I was researching multiple myeloma treatments for my father.

It’s medical clickbait.