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Harvard Scientists Aim To Stop Cancer In Its Tracks
Shuntros writes "BBC News is reporting progress from scientists at Harvard Medical School towards strangling the growth of cancer cells. By starving cells of a certain type of enzyme, growth essentially ceases. 'The fact that proliferating cancer are able to consume glucose at a much higher rate than normal cells was first discovered by the German Nobel prize-winning chemist Otto Warburg more than 75 years ago. He also showed that the amount of glucose the cells needed to keep their vital signs ticking over was minimal, allowing them grow and divide at the prodigious rate usually associated with foetal cells.' Certainly not a cure by any stretch of the imagination, but putting the brakes on cancer growth in this way is very much akin to the revolution that was AZT."
The editors missed the most important fact. This is the enzyme which is actually inhibited by DiChloroAcetic Acid which was recently reported as the Wonder Drug by other groups of scientists. So this discovery already has a matching (though rather nasty) drug which has been shown to work in at least some studies. On top of all the drug is not patent encumbered and you can order it from any large chemical supplier. All that remains is to figure out the therapeutic doze and improve on the drug (DCA does have its side effects).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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While this discovery is of great importance, we still need to find an inhibitor for this enzyme that will not also inhibit normal pyruvate kinases. BTW, if anyone is interested in reading more about the discovery, Harvard Medical School has a more detailed press release and the two related articles in Nature can be found here (protein structure) and here (relationship to cancer). We haven't gotten to AZT yet, but this is a pretty large step towards finding a sort of "magic bullet" for tumors. At the very least, it's a common weakness most cancerous cells share.
Apparently, the major problem with cancer is that it isnt't just one disease, it's a whole myriad of conditions with one common characteristic - uncontrolled cell division. Finding one factor that brakes or halts growth in all cancers is a bit of a holy grail for scientists, and this enzyme seems to have at least some of the hallmarks.
That's not Picasso, that's Kandinsky!
actually, http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/03/189243 is what you're looking for.
This is a completely different approach, it only slows cancer using a drug to restrict the presence of a certain enzyme. In I Am Legend they used a retrovirus to control the cancer. (They used a modified version of measles which technically is a paramyxovirus, not a retrovirus
Not a chance. Fatty acids in the body are broken down by a process called beta-oxidation. The short carbon chains then enter the Krebs cycle (the same cycle used for ATP generation from glucose) and ATP (adenosine triphosphate - the energy currency of the cell) is released.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
And he would be wrong. The link between a high carbohydrate diet and cancer is tenuous at best. Not only that but high-fat diets have been implicated in raising the risk of some cancers. (Specifically prostate cancer) You could try reading these research studies. Long story short, cancer is a bunch of incredibly heterogenuous disorders and tumour growth is driven by totally different set of chemicals and enzymes depending on the type of cancer a patient has.
E. Giovannucci, E.B. Rimm and G.A. Colditz et al., A prospective study of dietary fat and risk of prostate cancer, J Natl Cancer Inst 85 (1993), pp. 1571-1579.
P.H. Gann, C.H. Hennekens and F.M. Sacks et al., Prospective study of plasma fatty acids and risk of prostate cancer, J Natl Cancer Inst 86 (1994), pp. 281-286
D.A. Snowdon, R.L. Phillips and W. Choi, Diet, obesity, and risk of fatal prostate cancer, Am J Epidemiol 120 (1984), pp. 244-250
A.W. Hsing, L. Tsao and S.S. Devesa, International trends and patterns of prostate cancer incidence and mortality, Int J Cancer 85 (2000), pp. 60-67
Warburg got two Nobels (IIRC, 1928 and 1931), in part by studying the role of oxygen in cell metabolism. Cancer cells use an anaerobic mechanism for metabolism. Flooding them with oxygen disrupts this anaerobic activity. This may account for at least some of the glucose effect in TFA. This can be accomplished using hyperbaric oxygen (high O2 content greater than 1 atmosphere's partial pressure).
It can also be done using superoxides (ozone, which produces hydrogen peroxide in the body, or H2O2 itself). Superoxide production is a normal part of the immune system, and cancer cells don't increase their SOD production proportionally with their growth rate. This is because the superoxides work on mitochondria, where metabolism occurs. The main cell is what's cancerous, not the mitochondria.
Another way to increase H2O2 in the body is to inhibit the enzyme that protects cells from high levels of H2O2, superoxide dismutase (SOD), allowing natural or infused levels of the substance to increase. Penicillin is one such SOD inhibitor, and other antibiotics are being tried. The effects are variable but generally positive. This can be facilitated by including manganese, selenium or zinc, around which the SOD builds itself, explaining the role of minerals containing these to be helpful in fighting infections.
Yes, the increased H2O2 levels can be harmful to cells, or else the body wouldn't have a mechanism to keep it in check. This is the role antioxidants play. Excessive H2O2 is an earmark of autoimmune diseases. There is an optimum level for normal cells. But cancer cells are much more sensitive, and a little damage due to superoxides is preferred over a lot of damage due to cancer.
I found some of the above information while researching my dissertation. It was based on inhibiting another oxygen scavenger, monoamine oxidase (MAO). The MAO inhibitor I looked at is trimethyl naphthoquinone (TMN), and this substance can protect the body from at least one autoimmune disease, Parkinson's. It is ironic then that one common source of TMN is in smoking tobacco. An anti-carcinogen effect isn't seen in smoking (though it may in fact occur) because of the other chemicals in smoking which are carcinogenic to an extent orders of magnitude greater than TMN's. Its MAO inhibition plateaus at low doses whereas the carcinogens don't, so getting TMN is better accomplished other ways. This, and other MAO inhibitors might be helpful in fighting cancer. These are not being widely tested, but the little research so far (mostly in other natural products) is showing some anti-carcinogen effect. SOD inhibition is probably much more effective than MAO inhibition, however the MAO inhibitor effect supports the hypothesized role of oxygen via a second if less effective mechanism.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Cancer typically kills older people. In large swathes of the developing world, as life expectancy increases, cancer starts to become a major issue. But that doesn't in itself mean that the diet caused it. Just that people are now living long enough to get the disease. Correlation does NOT equal causation.
I call BS. No less authority than MD Anderson (#1 cancer facility in U.S.) has been studying curcumin for years (which the woman points out is how she found out about it). MD Anderson has not found it to be "a cure for cancer" so far. MD Anderson studies far outweigh the data point of "a friend of my mother's". I can find nothing in her blog that indicates she had "metastasized" cancer. Please don't go around telling people she cured metastasized cancer with curcumin; you may give false hope to, for example, someone with metastasized breast cancer, a disease that has a nearly perfect kill rate at Stage IV.
Cancers differ based on the type of cell that originally became cancerous, just like car wrecks differ depending on the type of vehicle. She has multiple myeloma, and some varieties of MM are so indolent that doctors recommend no treatment. If your doctor recommends "let's wait and see if it actually gets worse", then knock yourself out with curcumin.
This is not a knock against curcumin, which may turn out to be a useful anti-cancer agent, and I certainly put it my wife's adjuvant therapy (amongst a *great* many other substances) to try to prevent metastasis. It's a knock against claiming a cure for cancer exists and is cheap and is just ignored because of financial reasons. Before you do that, please spend a few years studying cancer and walking the cancer wards. If you don't have great respect for how far the problem of cancer thus far exceeds our intelligence, then you don't understand cancer.
Ditto for IP6. If you get cancer and want to forgo treatment in favor of phytochemicals, despite the clear evidence that your body has allowed a cancer to grow unfettered and needs some major help, then good luck with that and let me know how that works out for ya. But don't tell other people to do that. Some desperate fool might think you know what you're talking about.