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."

Wonderful editorial work

[arivanov]

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).

Low Carb? No Really.

[localman]

If glucose restriction impedes cancer growth, is it possible that extreme carb restriction (which forces the body to run off ketones instead) would imede cancer growth as well? There's still a small amount of glucose required for the brain, I believe, but perhaps the level would be low enough to slow things down, or help in conjunction with other treatments?

Just a thought.

Re:Wonderful editorial work

[arivanov]

The activity of DCA is simply based upon the Warburg effect, not on the inhibition of this specific variety of pyruvate kinase.

AFAIK the results so far could not be explained by the Warburg effect alone and that was the reason why many scientists questioned the DCA results. So this makes the DCA results doubly interesting.

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[chooks]

Since this is /., I can be nitpicky and say that the TCA releases very little ATP. Most ATP is generated via oxidative phosphorylation [wikipedia.org] using NADH and FADH2 created in the TCA.

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[tie_guy_matt]

Gary Taubes sure thinks so. You should read his book "Good calories bad calories." He points out that cancer is one of a set of diseases that used to be called "diseases of civilization" (along with heart disease, obesity and a bunch of others) because they were extremely rare in tribal people from around the world until they became westernized.

One thing that always happens when people become westernized is that they eat more sugar and processed carbs. Gary claims that the sugar and cancer relationship has never been tested because it has been assumed that sugar is good while fat is bad. Yet if fat is the problem then why did Eskimos not get these diseases on their diet of largely whales and other animals until after they were westernized and started actually eating a lot less fat but tons of sugar and carbs?

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[siddster]

This is a tad off-topic but I think you are confusing the TCA cycle with anerobic glycolysis which results in the release of small amounts of ATP. The TCA cycle results in major production of NADH and FADH which enter the electron transport chain where oxidative phosporylation occcurs. "Oxidative phosphorylation" wouldn't occur if the TCA cycle stalled for any reason. (No NADH & FADH production)

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a cancer patient for whom conventional treatments have been exhausted, a extreme sugar // carb restricted diet is the primary alternative treatment that I'm currently trying. There are a huge of alternative/homeopathic theories that work from this premise, and many different diets. Anecdotally, I have heard of people for whom carb restriction has worked wonders. Personally, I have a tumor under the skin on my back that literally seems to grow overnight if I eat sugar (esp processed) the previous day.

Given the broad, although not clinically verified evidence, I find it extremely discouraging that none of my half-dozen oncologists has EVER mentioned this as an option. In fact they have never mentioned anything about diet. Doctors are often blind and/or dismissive of options that are not within their training/experience.

This article is encouraging, if simply for the fact that it shows people are exploring avenues outside of the typical chemo/radiation/surgery modalities.

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[AlejoHausner]

Your comments on beta-oxidation are confusing. Can you fill us in a bit more?

Personally, I find the idea of a low-carb diet for cancer makes some sense. After all, if cancer cells consume glucose at a prodigious rate, then bringing down the level of glucose in the bloodstream would be a good idea. I do know that lowcarb diets do indeed keep blood glucose levels constant.

Of course, this is "common sense", and the body doesn't always follow common sense. For example, exercise doesn't lead to weight loss, eating fat doesn't make you fat, etc.

One test for the low-carb-slows-cancer hypothesis would be if the growth rate of cancer were higher in people with high blood sugars. Do untreated diabetics tend to die of cancer faster?

Re:Really disappointed in our Cancer researchers.

[Hatta]

Yeah, you'd think curing cancer was hard or something. Face it, western medicine has already picked all the low hanging fruit. We should consider ourselves lucky that we live long enough to develop cancer.

If you live long enough, you will accrue mutations that will lead to cancer. Cancerous cells are your cells, so it's bound to be difficult to kill one and not the other. It's a hard problem, compounded by the fact that there are almost as many types of cancer as there are cancer patients. There's never going to be a magic bullet, but we're getting better at understanding and detecting the subtle genetic difference between cancerous and healthy cells and many types of cancer are far less fatal than they were a couple decades ago.

Re:Really disappointed in our Cancer researchers.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have reduced cervical cancer from the number one cause of cancer deaths in women in the 1930's to causing only about 5000 deaths annually in the US. A geeky pathologist named Dr Papanicolaou saved the lives of more women than any doctor in history. Of course now we've got a cancer vaccine which decreases the remaining risk by 2/3.

And we've had significant drops in colon and breast cancer death rates (despite similar rates of diagnosis).

I should also mention that the reason that we call leukemias either acute or chronic (as in acute lymphocytic leukemia - ALL versus chronic lymphocytic leukemia - CLL) was that fact that people (usually kids) with ALL uniformly died very quickly and the ones with CLL lived a few years. Now kids with ALL have a 75% chance of survival.

And we don't have 'clean rooms' like on TV. There are PPV rooms, but they are hardly going to protect you completely. We also don't have tricorders, which sucks greatly. But hey, if you are so dissapointed, why not go out there and invent one yourself.

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[jimicus]

He points out that cancer is one of a set of diseases that used to be called "diseases of civilization" (along with heart disease, obesity and a bunch of others) because they were extremely rare in tribal people from around the world until they became westernized.

Purely out of curiosity, how frequently were these non-westernised tribal people examined by doctors for cancer using conventional technology when they developed an illness? And how many accurate records of death (and particularly cause of death, determined via an autopsy rather than via a witch doctor) were kept?

Another chemotherapy...

[ruinevil]

It appears that DCA [wikipedia.org] screws up nerve cells permanently. Even though most cells aren't affected by the drug, if you damage cells that can't replicate, it's bad. Neurons cannot replicate. If they can stop that it might be viable. Until then, stick with your old chemo drugs, that screw up hair, skin, and marrow stem cells, stuff that is rapid growing and replaceable.

Dr John Holt's Cancer Treatment

[scooma]

As Harvard is likely treading in Dr Holt's footsteps, they might want to examine his published papers. Note that whilst practising, he only took on patients that other doctors had given up on. His *cure* rate was around 98%. All cases documented.

Holt, JA 1979, "The cause of cancer: biochemical defects in the cancer cell demonstrated by the effects of electromagnetic radiation, glucose and oxygen", Med Hypotheses, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 109-143.
Holt, J 1983, "Cancer, a disease of defective glucose metabolism: the energy for mitosis appears to come from a gluathione mediated glycolysis", Med Hypotheses, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 133-150. [Holt83]
The rest are at: http://www.the-institute.com.au/reference_pubs.html [the-institute.com.au]

Cure for Optimism

[RonBurk]

No cure for cancer, but at least a partial cure for unfounded optimism about finding a cure for cancer can be found in this talk by Lee Hartwell, Nobel prize winner and head of the Fred Hutchinson cancer center in Seattle:

http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=2669 [uwtv.org]

Not only is it wrong to view all cancers as a single disease, it may be wrong to view the cancer in a single patient as a single disease. Cancer is genetically unstable, and it may turn out that the nature of the stability is plausibly modelled by assuming the cancer is using genetic (oh the irony) algorithms. IOW, past a certain point (e.g., metastasis), the cancer cells (at least a small minority of them), may be constantly spitting out all manner of genetic mutations at a high rate. This would help explain the extreme adaptability of most forms of cancer metastasis to whatever treatment you care to throw at them. As Judah Folkman said, every time a patient's cancer returns, it seems to have learned about new growth factors.

If you're worried about cancer, focus on prevention, not on the hope of a cure.

Re:Low Carb? No Really.

[AshtangiMan]

My experience is much the same. When I stopped eating sugar, but ate a lot of fat (mostly in the form of clarified butter, olive oil, and grapeseed oil), vegetables, brown basmati rice, and protein (fish and lentils), I could barely keep weight on. Mostly from a lot of calorie burning exercise I guess. I could eat as much as I wanted though and not gain weight. Now I am about 40 pounds heavier and have been eating a lot more sugar and processed foods. I exercise less, but still a lot, and have to really watch how much I eat or I'll gain weight. For me, the diet is the culprit, and now that I'm done with my Master's degree I can start having more time to do the simple things that matter, namely cooking and eating unprocessed foods every day, every meal. I'm hoping that one year from now I have dropped 30 lbs and am on my way back to the great health that I experienced previously.