Study Reveals Cancer's 'Infinite' Ability To Evolve (bbc.com) 45
An unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an "almost infinite" ability of tumors to evolve and survive, say scientists. The BBC reports: The results of tracking lung cancers for nine years left the research team "surprised" and "in awe" at the formidable force they were up against. They have concluded we need more focus on prevention, with a "universal" cure unlikely any time soon. The study -- entitled TracerX -- provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread. More than 400 people -- treated at 13 hospitals in the UK -- had biopsies taken from different parts of their lung cancer as the disease progressed.
The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed:
- Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body
- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body
- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan
- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse."
Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline.
"I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.
The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed:
- Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body
- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body
- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan
- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse."
Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline.
"I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.
Prevention *today* via nutrition & healthy liv (Score:2)
"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog... [drfuhrman.com]
"Looking for the biggest bang for your caloric buck? Remember the acronym G-BOMBS, which stands for Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries and Seeds. These foods fuel your body with protective micronutrients and phytochemicals that support your immune defenses and have a wide range of health-promoting effects. And here's a bonus: They're delicious!"
Other things boost the immune system too like exercise,
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Or how about just get rid of all the sugar which is what 99% of all cancers exclusivity use for energy production. Just doing this alone will slow or stop the growth and also make the conventional treatments more effective.
Don't believe me? Just look at the PET Scan process for cancers.
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Better to just stop pollution with toxins from fossil fuels (burn emissions, water pollution, refinery emissions, plastics, most insecticides, etc.) then we wouldn't need vaccines, treatments, and "immune boosters".
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Yeah FUCK vaccines man, let's bring back lobotomies. You're going first.
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Re:It is built-in (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a hard call... do I want to be a crocodile or do I want human Netflix and Xbox...
But seriously, I've read time and again that eating less processed food is associated with less gut cancers. And less smoking with less lung cancers. So there's probably good insight pointing to prevention being low hanging fruit.
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Re: It is built-in (Score:2)
Mutations cause cancer. However they also allow evolution so without them we wouldn't exist and if we stopped them now then we may all be wiped out by a single disease in the future as any genetic variation would be frozen.
Re:It is built-in (Score:4, Funny)
So there's probably good insight pointing to prevention being low hanging fruit.
Instructions unclear, I ate nothing but the low hanging fruit and now I think I need a new pancreas.
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The human endocrine system has a design flaw: the role of estrogen (most carcinogens act like estrogen in the body).
This is kind of nonsense. If you get rid of estrogen, you will still have cancer (as you admit, by mentioning other carcinogens than estrogen). Even breast cancer would still exist without estrogen.
The reality is, if you want cells to be able to grow and regenerate (like skin cells. Skin cells have the ability to regenerate indefinitely), then you need mechanisms in the cell for indefinite regeneration. And if you have mechanisms for growth and regeneration, then sometimes they are going to get broken and
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23043248/ [nih.gov]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1095643305004186 [sciencedirect.com]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35047686/ [nih.gov]
We see it in lobsters too.
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1) It needs a mutation to eliminate (in some way) the p53 gene that causes cell suicide if the DNA mutates weirdly. And other genetic checks.
2) It needs a mutation to start it growing rapidly.
3) That's not enough though, the growth will always be limited until there is another mutation to start growing blood vessels to bring in more nutrients.
4) That's not enough to kill you, it then needs more mutations to escape whatever organ contains it, an
Could cancer be 'incomplete dedifferentiation' ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Regarding cancer, I recently read an old book called 'The Body Electric'. Originally published in the 80s or 90s, this book describes good research done in the 70s and 80s on the interaction between electric currents in the body and vital bodily processes. The main author is Dr. Robert Becker, who did the original research.
An orthopedic surgeon by training, Dr. Becker had a lot of success treating injuries and bone breaks in people using a simple silver coated nylon fabric, connected to a battery supplying
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There can be no negative or positive current for a cell unless you put a tiny electrode inside it, it's just current.
Silver ions are cytotoxic, dead cells can have a globular form where mitosis doesn't occur too.
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Hmm... that doens't seem to be case according to the experiment described.
Continuing on with the excerpt:
"Dedifferentiated cells normally divide rapidly, but these didn't, perhaps because they were sitting in a plastic dish far removed from the normal stimuli of an animal's body. Within a day after the current was turned off, the cells clumped together into bits of pseudotissue that looked like the young "bone marrow" we'd seen in the exudate [referring to something described earlier], After two weeks, they'd all reverted back to mature fibroblasts, presumably because regular replacement of the nutrient medium had by then washed out all the silver ions."
From elsewhere in the book:
"We repeated the same fracture studies, but this time we also observed the cells while they were alive. We took tissue samples from the fractures and made time-lapse film sequences using techniques like those in the movie that had impressed me so much at the NAS workshop. We confirmed that the changes began in the first few hours, just after the electrical forces reached their peak. Now we decided to try a crucial test. If the electricity really triggered healing, we should be able to reproduce the same field artificially and start the same changes in normal blood cells outside the frog."
"I calculated the amount of current that would produce the fields I'd found. I came up with an incredibly small amount, somewhere between a trillionth and a billionth of an ampere (a picoamp and a nanoamp, respectively). "
"and well within the range I'd calculated-about half a billionth of an ampere. At eleven that morning he called me excitedly and I rushed across the street. With the room darkened and the microscope light on, we saw the same cell changes as in the blood clot, first at the negative electrode, then at the positive electrode, and finally spreading across the rest of the chamber. In four hours all the blood cells in the chamber had reactivated their nuclei, lost their hemoglobin, and become completely unspecialized in form. "
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Per your reply, I remember reading [popsci.com] about a smart, former-computer programmer who ran with the knowledge he gained from that book--Harvard gave him his own lab!
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> Per the article, I wonder how the Nobel discovery in the 1930s that sugar feeds tumors plays into this.
Ah, the Warburg hypothesis. I'm no expert, but I think it's somehow related to another theory that cancers are the result of damaged or dysfynctional mitochondria switching to fermentation-based (as opposed to respiration-based) energy generation. That's probably why Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT) works the way it does - in IPT, medical professionals (carefully) induce a temporary hypoglycemic sta
Re:Could cancer be 'incomplete dedifferentiation' (Score:5, Insightful)
A good rule of thumb is, novel scientific claims made to general public, rather than scientific peers, rarely end up valid.
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In Chapter 12 of his book, he presents the hypothesis that cancer cells are stuck in a state of 'incomplete dedifferentiation' -- the process by which a mature cell returns to its original embryonic, unspecialised state -- perhaps to repair an injured body part.
Generally, no. Cancer is a disease of the genome. The DNA gets mutated beyond all recognition. Cancer almost always occurs in cells that division frequently, like epithelial cells. Each division is a chance for a mutation. Frequent division means more chances for mutations.
Neoantigens are a fragile target (Score:2)
The spike on a corona virus is functional, a random mutation affecting it is likely to destroy the functionality. Neoantigens are not necessary for a malignant cancer, if a random mutation changes them it becomes useless to the vaccine but it's irrelevant to the cancer.
What's necessary is artificial viruses (possibly LNP based) which blow up a cancer cell based on intracellular functional features, which do not so easily mutate. Though that would no longer be a vaccine.
Quit with the singular already (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that there are more varieties of cancer than you could shake a rabid mongoose at, using the singular is just terrible reporting
"lung cancer" - there we go....
What about large animals? (Score:2)
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Re: What about large animals? (Score:2)
The smaller the animal the higher the metabolic rate which means more cellular biology happening in a given time period which allows more chance for something to go wrong in RNA creation.
Cancer does not "evolve" (Score:2)
At the end the cancer is always dead. The only question is whether the patient is dead as well.
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That doesn't mean it doesn't evolve. All life ultimately dies, for one reason or another. The fact that cancer usually dies due to damaging its environment (human body) to the point it can no longer support the cancer doesn't preclude it evolving before that point.
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That process is called "adaption" not "evolution". Evolution requires reproduction on a non-cellular level (unless the whole organism is single-cell).
But I guess somebody had to abuse language to make their stuff sound more exciting.
Re: Cancer does not "evolve" (Score:2)
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Adaption generally indicates a strategy, but it does not need to be a planned or conscious one. Anyways, my objection is to use the term "evolve" for something that does not use reproduction.
"The Emperor of All Maladies" (Score:2)
Great book on the subject: "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer"
https://www.amazon.com/Emperor... [amazon.com]
Eucharyot Compact is responsible for cancer. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a draconian system where a cell is not allowed to live up to its full potential. Every cell has the DNA and the ability to become anything it wants to be, a heart cell, kidney cell or anything at all. But it is created unequal and it is destined to live by the rules of the caste it was born into.
Should one freedom loving cell decide to rebel, and decide to pursue happiness its way, exercise its right to reproduce, refuse to die on command, the whole collective comes down hard.
The collective calls the cells that defy the death warrant tumors. It comes down hard on the patriots. They get exiled by a process called surgery. Guilt by association too, healthy obedient non rebellious cells are also exiled sometimes. The collective calls it prophylactic surgery. Then comes chemical warfare. Chemotherapy kills so many healthy law abiding cells, puts the entire collective into severe distress. Not satisfied with chemical warfare, the collective goes nuclear! Yes, sir, it brings in radiation, harmful radiation and blast the rebel and any other cell standing in the way or even behind the rebel cells. And what does the collective promise the cells in return for giving up so much? Regular supply of oxygen, nutrients, removal of carbon dioxide, lactic acid, regular municipal function of garbage collection and ration of food. That is all. Just for some simple functions of a municipality all these cells surrender their freedom, their liberty and their independence.
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unlike some backward thinking people :p (Score:3)
Looks like Cancer Evolves unlike some backward thinking people stuck in the stone age :p
obligatory car analogy: it's like some people were still using the original wheel/tires from the stone age made from stone and others were using the latest rubber polymer
man, I need a better car analogy.. I think this one is bad and I wrote it :p
This doesn’t jive (Score:2)
with all the conspiracy theorists on Youtube who claim that Big Pharma has had a universal cure all along but withhold it so they can make more money.
almost (Score:2)
Haha. Just how big is "almost infinite"? Maybe infinity - 1000? Please enlighten.
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Direct that evolution (Score:1)
Devise a series of drug and chemical treatments that drive the evolution down a certain path ... then deliver the kill shot.