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Cancer Resembles Life 1 Billion Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "What is cancer? It's not an invader; it's spawned from our own bodies. And it bears striking resemblance to early multicellular life from 1 billion years ago. This has led astrobiologists and cosmologists Paul Davies and Charlie Lineweaver to suggest that cancer is driven by primitive genes that govern cellular cooperation (abstract), and which kick in when our more recently evolved genes that keep them in check break down. So, far from being rogue cells that mutate out of control, cancers are actually cells that revert to a more ancient level of programming, like booting in Safe Mode. The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we'll know how it works. It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought."
this is awesome. less permutations of cancer = more chance of me living to be 400 years old! here's hopin!
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
nanos gigantium humeris insidentes
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Astrobiologists doing cancer "research"? Half of the submission is written as if they had cancer already nailed down, while the rest of it implies that they merely had this great idea, while looking at the stars after smoking some of the good stuff. If there are no experiments, hard results, conclusive evidence, well pfew, it's not news that matter. I make up a dozen theories like this per day.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
I mean, I understand you're trying to reach out to nerds, but since when was safe mode "More ancient programming" rather than just a mode where you only load the absolute minimum required to function?
booting in Safe Mode.
Is it possible for you people to wipe your butts without using some half-assed, fallacious computer analogy? Is this all the bazaar has done for you?
The summary look like curing cancer is a matter of very simple solution. I doubt this.
Even if cancer behavior rely on primitive gene programming. There where billion years of incremental evolution build and re-factored over that, I firmly doubt it is a matter of turning on/off or stripping out some cytochrome block cancerous cells from forming/growing.
Léa Gris
Dichloroacetate (DCA) is a cheap, un-patentable, drug (essentially 1vinegar molecule+2chlorine atoms) currently used to treat a rare enzyme disorder in children, but researchers have found it useful in allowing cancer cells to learn how to kill themselves with reasonably acceptable temporary side effects. See "DCA and How It Works" below.
There is almost no funding for this drug study due to it being un-patentable despite quite encouraging results, and reasonably acceptable and reversible side-effects.
Recent human trial reported here:
http://www.medindia.net/news/Dichloroacetate-Effective-Against-Aggressive-Brain-Cancer-68867-1.htm
Initial news from a couple of years ago...
http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/index.cfm
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19325874.700-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html?DCMP=ILC-Top5&nsref=mg19325874.700
Here's an excerpt...
"DCA and How It Works
Dichloroacetic acid versus Sodium Dichloroacetate
Dichloroacetic acid is a small molecule, basically acetic acid with 2 chlorines. The molecular formula is Cl2CHCOOH.
Dichloroacetate is the sodium salt of dichloroacetic acid. Replace a hydrogen with sodium and you get Cl2CHCOONa
If you view the video from CTV you will see a jar of dichloroacetic acid prominently displayed. http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/vid1.htm is well worth watching. But they used a “cheap ...powder”. Dichloroacetic acid only comes in liquid. The powder is the sodium salt of dichloroacetic acid. It is sodium dichloroacetate. The researchers did not use the acid.
For those of you searching for DCA, do not buy the acid. I posted info on the FAQ about it. The acid is not the same thing as the acetate. The acid is dangerously corrosive.
How does DCA work, briefly?
The Michelakis team reports that DCA turns on the mitochondria of cancer cells, allowing them to commit cellular suicide, or apoptosis.
Cancer cells shut down the mitochondria, which is the part of the cell that is involved in metabolism and, incidentally, initiates the cell suicide.
A non-cancerous cell will initiate apoptosis when it detects damage within itself that it cannot repair. But a cancer cell resists the suicide process. That is why chemotherapy and radiation treatments do not work very well and actually result in terrible side effects the healthy cells actually die much easier.
Michelakis and his team discovered that they could re-activate the mitochondria of cancer cells. Not only that, the DCA is very effective in doing it: To quote from the Michelakis paper: “The decrease in [Ca2+]i occurs within 5 min and is sustained after 48 hr of DCA exposure.” The mitochondria are so sensitive to DCA that just 5 minutes of exposure reactivates them for 48 hours.
The metabolic approach to cancer is supported by other research. Inhibition of Glycolysis in Cancer Cells: A Novel Strategy to Overcome Drug Resistance Associated with Mitochondrial Respiratory Defect and Hypoxia is a paper by a John Hopkins research team supporting this approach.
http://www.thedcasite.com/dcaforum/DCForumID1/79.html is a post on our chat room by Willis. giving a prediction as to which cancers DCA might not control, and it is being supported by the reports we are receiving."
More on the left side of this web page:
http://www.thedcasite.com/dca_how_it_works.html
= 9J =
"It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought."
Gee since I just lost my mother to cancer last month and have lost way to many friends to it I have to say that this is the STUPIDEST, MOST ARROGANT statement I have read in a very long time.
How long have we been trying to cure and prevent cancer? We have made a lot of progress to be sure but the task and effort passed mammoth decades ago.
I welcome any news about improved treatment but really people let's not make light of the subject or the effort.
It reminds me of every clueless idiot that takes a look at a task that they can not do and say, "How hard can it be?"
And to those that are making jokes and or political comments about this. Well I hope you don't ever have to understand the things that I have learned about cancer over the last few years.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we'll know how it works. It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
We've already figured out how most cancer works. At a gross, generalized level you have oncogenes (genes responsible for driving growth) and tumor suppressor genes (genes responsible for regulating growth) when interrelated genes of both varieties break in a cell, it becomes a cancer. A detailed molecular understanding of how some cancers work have led to effective treatments (see: Imatinib, Tamoxifen and Raloxifene) but that's hardly been successfully translated to other cancers where the broken parts aren't as easily modulated. In fact, Raloxifene was developed specifically because Tamoxifen which inhibits an oncogene in breast tissue activated the same oncogene in uterine tissue. What 10 years of the human genome have taught us is that not all diseases are direct or simple breaks in genetic code and that not all diseases with known, simple breaks in the genetic code are as easily treatable as we might like.
Basically natural selection will be able to filter out any gene that affects the reproductive ability. Given the length of time, even extraordinarily minute differences will make a difference and eventually deleterious genes will be filtered out. But if some gene trades improved fitness at the reproductive stage for some serious cost to life at a later stage, that gene will never be filtered out. The extreme example is the trout that had traded it so much that it dies immediately after spawning. Its entire metabolism is structured to improve fitness before spawning to very serious inability to live after spawning.
Even if these guys were right, and with modern science you are able to find that one gene whose loss of function causes cancer, and they are able to fix it, all it means is you will not die of cancer, but will die of other geriatric diseases. Some of them are painful, some of them are embarrassing. But the most heart wrenching ones are those that trap a dead brain in a functioning body or a functioning brain in a dying body.
I wish science would concentrate on improving the quality of life when alive and allow both the body and the brain to die together painlessly.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's a nice theory, but cancers aren't completely self sufficient. They need to form blood vessels to grow any larger than a pin head and early sponge-like organisms certainly didn't have those.
http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/grow/how-a-cancer-gets-its-blood-supply
given that this article postulates that cancer cells have apparently been the default mode of cellular division for perhaps billions of years, and personal computers have only been around for 30 years, it would be more appropriate to say you sometimes need to boot your computer into cancer mode. that's a more appropriate analogy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You are a mindless jerk.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If cancer is what life was like a billion years ago, then we should not be spending so much time, money, and effort to kill it. By pandering to our self-centered focus of survival and self-preservation, we could be preventing the next race of beings from evolving natually.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Life: the decision of approximately 4 billion cells to be 'you' for a while.
Cancer: When some of the 4 billion cells decide to form a 'tea party'.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
This explains that episode of Star Trek, Genesis. Right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29
Right?
EVERYTHING IN STAR TREK IS COMING TRUE!
Cancer keeps happening, if patients keep getting it, like the common cold, then Pharmacies will always have a supply of customers. For example, a Superbowl commercial could look like, "Oh, something for your Cancer? Isle 3, next to the Advil, fourth shelf down. Hand have a nice day."
What one cancer learns cannot be passed on to the next generation of cancers in other patients
Of course not. That would be Lamarkism, like believing that if we cut off the cats tail, its future kittens will have no tail. That queery aside, what evidence is there for this conclusion about the complexity of combat?:
The good news is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.
Even if their hypothesis is correct, that cancer involves the malfunctioning of a set of evolutionarily conserved genomic structures and processes, what evidence is there for concluding that combating cancer is not as going to be as complex as [something else we don't understand fully yet either]?
Who's to say that the unknown processes that cause genome modifications which sometimes result in cancer are not still evolving?
Cancer covers quite a bit of biological territory and not all cancers are created equal. This seams to trivialize just how diverse our bodies are and discounts its ability to adapt. I mean cancer at it's core is actually the bodies attempt to adapt to a situation that has gone awry. I read somewhere the body creates cancer cells every day of your life but the immune system takes care of it naturally. When someone gets cancer it is because the immune system didn't catch it and it was allowed to multiply.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're thinking. It's not like they could find other things to sell to people living longer. Geesh.
Windows isn't a virus, it's a cancer.
rewriting history since 2109
Maybe the few genes that regulate the primitive behavior are simple and incapable of evolving, although it’s not clear why those genes would not mutate. TFA doesn’t give any reason to believe there is only one mechanism for suppressing them, or that it only has one mode of failure.
The universe was intelligently designed. Unfortunately God was in a hurry so he coded it in Java.
I don't know about curing cancer but once we figure out the ancient genes we'll have access to all kinds of awesome technology. Let's get on this people!
More music, fewer hits
This is certainly adds a new definition for the old term 'legacy code'.
There ARE Lamarkian mechanisms at work, such as retroviruses. Just because not all acquired characteristics, like scars and lost limbs, are not heritable, does not mean that none are. Mothers pass non-genetic material through the womb and through breast milk for instance.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We can see an example of a similar concept during a Star Trek TNG Episode 271, where Dr. Crusher accidentally activates a dormant intron causes everyone to de-evolve to something else stored in their historical DNA!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
It's more evolved than 4chan?
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Cancer is (1) inability of the cell to keep sticking to the base + (2) inablity of the cell to not divide uncontrollably, both are closely related. If you have structured body of many eukaryotic cells you need your organs (2) to be contained and (1) not to mix
Early eukaryots were monocellular, so they neither have a need (1) to contain the growth (2) to stick to the base. And that is the simplest behavior of the cell: it grows until third party puts a stop to it, and it does not stick to anything, because sticking requires extra effort.
Once eukaryots developed and became (1) multicellular, they developed (2) specilialization, so the need for the mechanisms to (1) stick to the base and to (2) control the growth arised. Once those mechanism fail, organism gets cancer.
Obviously ancient systems that need to be controled by newer anticancer systems go amok when the latter fail, and those systems they are talking about.
As usual, all is very trivial, and no need for hupla.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
LOL, please!
Retroviruses can be endogenous or exogenous. But they aren't inherited if acquired exogenously unless acquired by a germ cell i.e. for e.g. an exogenous retrovirus that causes breast cancer won't be inherited.
It is when you realize that no pharma company actually wants to cure cancer...
MABASPLOOM!
Despit citing some pretty major papers the author seems to have fundimentaly misunderstood the nature of cancer (im suprised it got published even in a journal with such a low IF). The hallmarks of cancer, which are referenced but misinterpretted, show that a cell must go through a number of stages before reaching malingancy. Il be coming from this from a skewed angle as I study cancer purely from a DNA Damage response angle (and im only at the PhD stage) but the idea that the cells are going into a 'safe mode' is crazy, insted they need to escape normal control, yes through mutations but most of the time the mutations are found by the cells damage detectors and repaired. its only when mutations in the regulators come about that the cell starts to descend into cancer, This is the principle of most chemotherapy, force cells to repair a type of damage that the cancerous cells have become defective in. An example of this is the current use of PARP inhibitors which forces cells to play with homologous recombination(HR), whether or not you want healthy cells forced to use this is still out for discussion but cells with defective HR die as they cant repair the damage caused by the chemotherapy agent.
I digress, cancer might one day be a quite managable disease once we can sequence tumours cheaply and easyly but this will still leave many problems. Such as the heterogenity of tumours and the negative effects of chemotherapy in general but it could become something you live with not a menacing shadow.
This discovery could be a nice intro for a Star Trek TNG episode. Riker comes down with a new aggressive type of cancer and the captain refuses treatment. The crew is not very happy about the decision. Luckily, towards the end of the episode Dr Crusher discovers a method to gently beam cancer cells out of the patient's body. The cells are then relocated to an empty M-class planet.
Face it: multicellular life is one gigantic hack, bolted onto what were originally single-celled organisms. When that hack breaks, yeah, it's a little like the cells have entered "safe mode", but A) I wouldn't call it "safe", I'd call it "rogue/self-interested mode", and B) almost 3 billion years of evolution of multicellular organisms has led to the evolution of all sorts of specialized systems to detect and deal with the paradox of a cell "going rogue" and resorting to unicellular-like "unbounded growth" mode. Cancer doesn't develop unopposed by the rest of the cells in a body. Cells have built-in systems to deal with it. It's only when these defense systems break down that cancer changes from a single defective cell into an organized tumor that starts diverting resources and causing all sorts of other problems due to the proliferation of those cells.
Despite what the article implies, there isn't a simple solution to this situation. It's a grand, elaborate, interdependent, multi-layered, necessary and ultimately rather beautiful hack that would impress Rube Goldberg. You can't fix a problem that deeply embedded easily without all sorts of breakage. It's not as if you can tear out the core of it and replace it with something that was "designed from scratch" with multicellularity in mind. Any leftover older genes are going to be deeply intertwined with the function of the essential add-ons, and all sorts of old stuff has been tweaked or tossed while making those changes. We're stuck with cancer as a basic "side effect" of multicellularity.
With an understanding like this, it can help, but it also means that cancer is a disease as diverse as the cells in the body and as diverse as individual people. It won't have a single solution, more like a solution for each particular type of breakage.
http://clinicaltrialsfeeds.org/clinical-trials/show/NCT01029925
= 9J =
Does Joe Flanigan know that he has cancer?
I thought Cancer was cured a lot time ago, and its the big pharmaceutical companies that have a conspiracy to keep it going for huge profits!
Really, I wish it was even like any kind of modern code... even code from the Daily WTF.
It's actually a mess of spaghetti code, where some gene works by misusing another gene in perverse ways. And one gene ends up controlling hair color, blood clotting, fight-or-flight response, _and_ sensitivity to pain and anesthetics. And some parts are both code and data (in as much as you can call a bit of DNA either.) And, I kid you not, you actually have at least one bit of self-modifying code in your immune system.
(Not to mention, one which temporarily produces invalid DNA, to misuse a repair mechanism to do the modification for it. It's akin to using some obscure bug to force a bit to store a 2 instead of 0 or 1, in order to exploit a quirk in the memory parity circuitry. That kind of non-orthogonal programming.)
And some bugs which have been left unfixed for tens of millions of years... and we still do workarounds for. E.g., you actually have a gene that would have normally allowed you to synthesize as much vitamin C as you need, but it got broken in one of our very distant monkey ancestors. And since it was eating lots of fruits, there was no pressure to select the broken gene out.
Really, it's _such_ a complete mess...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Cancer is the natural state of cells. Non-cancer is a state our bodies have achieved through intricate command-and-control mechanisms. We are a colony of trillion individual living cells all working under a social contract that has them all sworn to celebacy and pinning all their hopes and dreams on the success or failure of a few eggs and sperm fired off into the beyond. All it takes is a breakdown in one frustrated cellular rebel saying "enough of this, I'm doing my own thing!" and you have a cancer. In fact you have cancers all the time and the body is constantly putting down the rebellions. Every now and then, one of them will get out of control. It's the fate that eventually dooms any multi-cellular life (especially animal life where our default cell template is a squirming little ameoba that doesn't have to accept sitting where it was born in the body).
Saying that a universal cure for cancer can be found because cancer cells typically behave in a more primitive way is like saying a crime-free society can be achieved because criminals tend to be less educated.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people one can readily find who will just mentally glom onto a conspiracy theory and resolutely hold to that notion as though it were an incontrovertible fact, simultaneously ignoring not only the reasonable evidence that might well suggest that the perspective is wrong, and also ignoring the fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the notion outside of the contrived ideas that build up the notion in the first place, but also choosing to completely disregard the very real factors in the world that are likely to have prevented such a conspiracy from developing in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So.... when we're treating cancer we're destroying future civilizations?? Isn't that against the prime directive?
I so wish I had Mod points today. I am sick of everyone making everything a political view.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"...colonies of eukaryotic cells in which cellular cooperation was fairly rudimentary, consisting of networks of adhering cells exchanging information chemically, and forming self-organized assemblages with only a moderate division of labor. These proto-metazoans were effectively small, loosely-knit ecosystems that fell short of the complex organization and regulation we associate with most modern metazoans. In short, proto-metazoans, which we dub Metazoans 1.0, were tumor-like neoplasms." Just because it has wheels, fenders, an engine, a steering wheel, etc doesn't make a car and a truck equivalent.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/0081988
Excerpt:
Cancer and evolution have traditionally been considered separately by different scientists with different interests using different methods. You could graduate from medical school, you could follow that with a Ph.D. in cell biology or molecular genetics, you could become a respected oncologist or a well-funded cancer researcher, without ever having read Darwin. You could do it, in fact, without having studied much evolutionary biology at all. Many cell and molecular biologists tended even to scorn evolutionary biology as a “merely descriptive” enterprise, lacking the rigor, quantifiability, and explanatory power of their disciplines. There were exceptions to this disconnect, cancer scientists who even during the early days thought in evolutionary terms, but those scientists had little influence.
In recent decades, however, the situation has changed, as molecular genetics and evolutionary biology have converged on some shared questions. One signal act of synthesis occurred in 1976 when a leukemia researcher named Peter Nowell published a theoretical paper in Science titled “The Clonal Evolution of Tumor Cell Populations.” Nowell proposed what was then a novel idea: that the biological events occurring when cells progress from normal to pre-cancerous to cancerous represent a form of evolution by natural selection. As with the evolution of species, he suggested, the evolution of malignant tumors requires two conditions: genetic diversity among the individuals of a population and competition among those individuals for limited resources. Genetic diversity within one mass of pre-cancerous cells comes from mutations—copying errors and other forms of change—that yield variants as the cells reproduce. That is, in the very act of replicating themselves (sometimes inaccurately), the cells diversify into a population encompassing some small genetic differences between one cell and another. Each variant cell then replicates itself true to type, constituting a clonal lineage (a lineage of accurate copies), until the next mutation creates a new variant. The fittest variants survive and proliferate. By this means, the genetic character of the cell population gradually changes, and with such change comes adaptation, a better fit to environmental circumstances. What constitutes “the fittest” among clonal lineages within a pre-cancerous growth? Those that can reproduce fastest. Those that can resist chemotherapy. Those that can metastasize and therefore escape the surgeon’s knife.
Nowell’s hypothesis about tumor evolution became widely known and accepted within certain circles of cancer research. (Among other researchers, it wasn’t adamantly disputed but merely ignored.) Those circles have more recently produced a lot of rich theorizing, and a smaller amount of empirical work, supporting Nowell and carrying his idea forward. A culmination of sorts occurred in 2000, when the cancer geneticist Robert Weinberg, discoverer of the first human oncogene and the first tumor suppressor gene, published a concise paper titled “The Hallmarks of Cancer.” Weinberg and his coauthor, Doug las Hanahan, described six “acquired capabilities,” such as endless self-replication, the ignoring of antigrowth signals, the invasion of neighboring tissues, and the refusal to die, that collectively characterize cancer cells. How are those capabilities acquired? By mutations and other genetic changes, giving cells with one such trait or another competitive advantage over normal cells. Hanahan and Weinberg added that “tumor development proceeds via a process formally analogous to Darwinian evolution.” With this cautious phrasing, they gave authoritative endorsement to the idea that Peter Nowell had proposed: Cancers, like species, evolve.
-kgj
Anything is easy once you have a solution. What did it take to get to that solution? Add it up, it still looks like a mammoth task if you ask me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
http://clinicaltrialsfeeds.org/clinical-trials/show/NCT01029925
Additional suggestions that maybe a "simple" solution does exist, but in the same sense that Alexander had a simple solution for the Gordian Knot...
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1865024/dca_research_on_brain_cancer/
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100512/full/news.2010.236.html?s=news_rss
More about DCA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid
= 9J =
Saying that a universal cure for cancer can be found because cancer cells typically behave in a more primitive way is like saying a crime-free society can be achieved because criminals tend to be less educated.
Ignoring the fact that that isn't what the article says, the analogy is an interesting one. Criminals form mobs and gangs, more primitive structures than a complex society, based, perhaps on behviours we evolved when we lived in tribes. Understanding enough about tribe, mob and gang dynamics might give you ways to disrupt all common, or even all possible, mob or gang structures.
Even if their hypothesis is correct, that cancer involves the malfunctioning of a set of evolutionarily conserved genomic structures and processes, what evidence is there for concluding that combating cancer is not as going to be as complex as [something else we don't understand fully yet either]?
None. It's premature to talk about evidence for how this will affect future therapies. At present this is just an idea -- maybe not even quite an hypothesis yet -- that might lead in some interesting directions. Like most such ideas it probably won't pan out, but there's nothing wrong with that.
It does no harm to entertain such an idea. If, as is most likely, this idea leads to a quick dead end, thinking about it will hardly have derailed the progress of science. We'll just add it to the great corpus of negative results and move on.
Who's to say that the unknown processes that cause genome modifications which sometimes result in cancer are not still evolving?
William of Occam for one. One can admit that such a thing is possible without having to assume it is so at this stage. Unless you have a specific mechanism in mind that has been empirically tested, this argument doesn't really have any force. If we *discover* such a heretofore unidentified mechanism, that counts as real scientific progress even if it is yet one more empirical reason we'll never have a silver bullet for cancer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"...it may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer."
http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/Updates/2007-03-15_Update.cfm
"The University of Alberta Discovery
DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule. And researchers at the University of Alberta believe it may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer.
Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the U of A Department of Medicine, has shown that dichloroacetate (DCA) causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast, and brain tumors.
Michelakis and his colleagues, including post-doctoral fellow Dr. Sebastien Bonnet, have published the results of their research in the journal Cancer Cell.
Scientists and doctors have used DCA for decades to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria, the energy producing units in cells, have been connected with cancer since the 1930s, when researchers first noticed that these organelles dysfunction when cancer is present.
Until recently, researchers believed that cancer-affected mitochondria are permanently damaged and that this damage is the result, not the cause, of the cancer. But Michelakis, a cardiologist, questioned this belief and began testing DCA, which activates a critical mitochondrial enzyme, as a way to "revive" cancer-affected mitochondria.
The results astounded him.
Michelakis and his colleagues found that DCA normalized the mitochondrial function in many cancers, showing that their function was actively suppressed by the cancer but was not permanently damaged by it.
More importantly, they found that the normalization of mitochondrial function resulted in a significant decrease in tumor growth both in test tubes and in animal models. Also, they noted that DCA, unlike most currently used chemotherapies, did not have any effects on normal, non-cancerous tissues.
"I think DCA can be selective for cancer because it attacks a fundamental process in cancer development that is unique to cancer cells," Michelakis said. "One of the really exciting things about this compound is that it might be able to treat many different forms of cancer".
Another encouraging thing about DCA is that, being so small, it is easily absorbed in the body, and, after oral intake, it can reach areas in the body that other drugs cannot, making it possible to treat brain cancers, for example.
Also, because DCA has been used in both healthy people and sick patients with mitochondrial diseases, researchers already know that it is a relatively non-toxic molecule that can be immediately tested patients with cancer.
"The results are intriguing because they point to the critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy"
Dario Alteri
Director University of Massachusetts Cancer Center
Investing in Research
The DCA compound is not patented and not owned by any pharmaceutical company, and, therefore, would likely be an inexpensive drug to administer, says Michelakis, the Canada Research Chair in Pulmonary Hypertension and Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program with Capital Health, one of Canada's largest health authorities.
However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials. He is grateful for the support he has already received from publicly funded agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), and he is hopeful such support will continue and allow him to conduct clinical trials of DCA on cancer patients.
Michelakis' research is currently funded by the CIHR, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs program, and the Alberta Her
Cancer biologist might not be able to think outside the box of cancer biology... which is a growing problem in all fields of science.
Cancer cells are immortal in the ironic sense that left alone their telomers do not break off after cell division which lets them grow out of control. Normal cells have the telomer "wick" shortened during one's lifespan.
[i]which kick in when our more recently evolved genes that keep them in check break down.[/i]
So..... Are they suggesting that a cure to cancer could be as simple as gene therapy? That is, simply replacing these genes that break down?
I've always thought it obvious that the proliferative capabilities of cancer cells resulted from leveraging ancient genes but I give the authors credit for stating it explicitly. However, I believe their conclusions that this improves hope for a cure are dead wrong, for the following reasons:
1. One billions years old is not very old biochemically. Most of the intracellular biochemical tricks are already old hat to the one-billion year old cell - they are not the gullible rubes you think they are.
2. You might expect cancer cells to be predictable because they fall back on early evolved mechanisms. Your expectations are just as likely to be wrong because proto-multicellular life could be a lot more mutable and adaptable than later, highly-constrained organisms. An analogy would be the greater speed and flexibility of older, smaller and simpler human cities and governments to form and adapt compared to the modern regulation-bound and bureaucratic ones.
In fact, if mutability itself turns out to be a 'tunable' property of ancient life, we can expect to be continually surprised by those 'primitive' cancer cells.
Building a better ribosome since 1997
This brings up a second level consideration as well - Cancer cells are remarkably similar to stem cells as well (Or so I've been given to understand as a layman).
If that's the case, are stem cells also an atavism, but more useful, and can cancer cells be switched over into stem cell mode in some way?
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Does this mean I can pick up smoking if it's fortified with cancer-blocking enzymes?
No, I will not work for your startup
I work in cancer diagnosis (Pathologist).
TFA is largely right. The oncogene / anti-oncogene model is wrong.
This is not new thinking, it is just that the unfortunate terminology we are saddled with makes it hard to get this concept across to a wider audience. Some authors are avoiding the oncogene / anti-oncogene terminology but as yet there is no consensus on this.
They were named that way because they were first identified in cancers (oncogenes) or found to be non functional in cancers (anti-oncogenes).
They were thought of as genetic time bombs and relics of the past and were named accordingly (Rb = retinoblastoma gene).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
These genes are highly conserved across genera and some (segmentation genes) are shared with insects.
These genes form a complex web of interaction that controls cellular proliferation, differentiation and death. They are the key to complex multicellular life.
When we understand the components of this web (just scratching the surface) and how they interact (only a few simple links identified so far) then a range of specific cancer treatments as envisaged in TFA should be possible.
I think this is the same Paul Davies who contributed to NASA's arsenic-bacteria debacle.
That web scam's putative mechanism for DCA activity is that cancer cells have completely inactive mitochondria? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you even know what a mitochondrion does?
Agreed, chemo works except when it doesn't.
It looks like UCLA is now paying attention and starting their own trial for using DCA on recurring breast cancer (breast cancer that was once treated, but has returned even after chemo).
http://clinicaltrialsfeeds.org/clinical-trials/show/NCT01029925
= 9J =
"MMS, B17 and DCA are all unpatentable. The FDA drug approval process is patent-based. Without a full patent and full ownership no pharmaceutical company will invest in drug development as they do not own the rights to the drug. The costs of drug testing are very high, with figures running from several hundred million to over a billion dollars. The FDA expects drug companies to have patent protection to allow them the ability to recover the high drug research and testing costs. Even orphan drugs need patent protection and the FDA often goes one step further by granting marketing exclusivity to compensate for the smaller markets those drugs serve.
There is no system in place for the development of unpatentable drugs, materials currently in the public domain. These potential therapies do not qualify as generic drugs either, as generics were patented drugs for which the research data has been submitted and the patents have expired. No data is in place for drugs that are not patentable."
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100809202210AA7A6h9
While it doesn't cover unpatentable drugs, the purpose of the Orphan Drug Act is an attempt to add incentive where Big Pharma can't find any on their own to develop drugs for less well covered diseases. It is a recognition by the government that without patents, drug companies and the universities they partner with are less willing to pursue research where there is no money to be made by a temporary monopoly on the drugs resulting from the research.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C0CE4DF1F3EF933A05757C0A966958260
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug
= 9J =
Unpatentable Drugs and the Standard of Patentability
http://www.texaslrev.com/issues/vol/87/issue/3/roin
Evolution is the success of the successful. Probably one of the early forms of life was immortal, until something fell on its head. So the kind of life we now experience was the successful adaptation. But it may have retained features of an earlier prototype, when it was immortal, which causes problems down the road.
I'm certainly no scientist, but this does make some logical sense. Doctors/Scientists do not know what causes cancer; just ask them. Someone mentioned the pharmaceuticals knowing a 'cure' but propagating drugs instead. There is some logic to that as well; follow the money trail. The fact is that many believe cancer can and is being 'cured' all the time. The 'cause' of many can be found by a bit of regression/statistical analysis. Also applies to Type II diabetes and heart disease. Plot the usage of pesticides fast foods, processed foods, high fructose corn syrup (and other refined sugars); all against the cancer rates. Since the war on cancer, the incidence has hardly been reduced, nor the survival rates by 'modern medicine'. The numbers don't lie! See for yourself! Add to that the increasing dominance of GMO crops which cross-contaminate other more 'natural' neighboring crops; these 'foods' have genetically embedded pathogens/pesticides! How's that for genetic engineering? If you then research doctors like Max Gerson back to the 1940's, you will see a steady, constant track record of cancer cures! Yes CURES. The cure? Just natural foods, organic fruits, vegetables, whole grains. There are numerous clinics around the world (not in the USA) curing cancer with a Holistic approach. They can't do business here in the USA because it is illegal! Yes, the AMA, FDA, Pharmaceuticals have managed to write laws that tell doctors they cannot prescribe non-pharmaceutical treatments or the will loose their license and be prosecuted! Doctors get almost NO education on nutrition, much less nutritional therapies. How is that for following the money trail? Before you toss tomatoes (please place them in a basket as they are high in lycopene and very therapeutic for cancer patients!), let me say that I have prostate cancer! Yep, and treating it with a Holistic approach is working as my PSA levels have returned to normal (see: http://prostatecancerfight.info./ I am walking the walk. So, this genetically based historical comment/research may have some substance after all. If these indeed are primitive genetic throwbacks that have resurfaced because of depressed immune system or other environmental contamination caused deficiency, maybe it should be examined! If whole organic foods can treat/cure cancer, maybe this natural approach addresses the primitive genetic strains by combating it with the same defense mechanisms that the human body has engineered over evolutionary time. So called medical science has made absolutely NO progress in fighting cancer, heart disease, diabetes II and other diseases; while natural organic foods seem to be presenting viable alternatives. Do the math. Chart the 'success' if you can find any. Remember the definition of 'doctors' of a cancer 'cure' is surviving FIVE years! The success of alternative holistic approaches measure success in decades! Go figure. Do your own research! Cheers, Skip Stein Orlando Florida http://www.wholefoods4healthyliving.com/
Skip Stein Free Agent Management Systems Consulting, Inc. http://www.msc-inc.net www.linkedin.com/in/skipstein
I do realise that it's mostly journalistic hype, but evidence of "tissued" life (as opposed to merely multicellular life) a billion years ago is pretty weak. What the biochemistry of those life forms was is even more speculative.
(Damn - I'm having a brain fade and can't remember what the most primitive present-day, undifferentiated multicellular organisms is. The flat disc-y things - Placozoa, that's them!)
Placozoa manage motile multicellular life with even less tissue differentiation than sponges, and appear at least as structurally complex as billion-year old organisms (NB I'm not talking about the 700~550 million year old organisms of the Ediacaran fauna, and I do know the difference). So significant cooperative behaviour of multiple cells (as seen in Placozoa) probably significantly pre-dates 1 billion years ago, while the development of differentiated tissues appears to have happened later.
There's a lot that we don't know about the transition between single-celled life and multiple-celled (or even multiple-tissued) life. While this work seems to be trying to find out what is happening, it does seem to be rather more wedded to a particular set of assumptions about the sequence of development of certain traits (inter-cellular signalling, differentiation of tissues) than we have evidence for.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
In fact, Raloxifene was developed specifically because Tamoxifen which inhibits an oncogene in breast tissue activated the same oncogene in uterine tissue.
Wait, what? They created a drug that leads to smaller breasts and larger vaginas? These mad scientists have gone too far! Surely, it should be the other way around. Does Raloxifiene do that then? Tighten below and widen above? Crazy off-label uses in 3... 2...
That's like saying your sick of people talking by making noises with their mouths. Everything is politics. No exceptions.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!