Miracle Cure?

Posted Apr 26, 2014 14:52 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Miracle Cure? by mpr22
Parent article: A note from your editor

I know of two ways to prevent cancer. One relatively reliable method that still fails from time to time is to be a naked mole rat (for reasons as yet unclear: the downside is that the causative factor appears to make you *look* like a naked mole rat). The other, totally reliable, is to be unicellular.

You may find both of these to be both difficult and undesirable approaches.

Cancer is a disease of multicellularity. If there were an easy way around it, if it were just a deficiency of some magic thing or other, we would already synthesise that magic thing and cancer would not happen (since it affects the young as well as the old, if at lower rates, and thus clearly puts cancer sufferers at a substantial selective disadvantage). We do not. Instead natural selection has built us a massive fortress of genetic defences and DNA repair mechanisms and controls on the cell cycle and even cancer-detecting assassin immune cells -- and *still* all this eventually fails. Thirty thousand nuclear DNA mutations per cell per day will eventually take their toll.

The only cure we have for all that accumulated damage is long-term cellular stasis and/or another round of natural selection, and unfortunately the only way to do that is to go back to single cells again and battle it out, best of umpty million sperm or ova win (yes, ova undergo a similar selection process, though at a different stage in the human lifespan). Of course, the result of that process isn't us any more -- it's our children, who will statistically be cancer-free -- and old age free, and mitochondrial damage free -- for N more years than we will.

Miracle Cure?

Posted May 2, 2014 20:37 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Doing my MSc, I came to the conclusion that sugar is a very nasty bioweapon. Fasting lets the body's repair mechanisms cut in and work - and could well allow those mechanisms to cut in and "cure" cancer. Or it might not - but fasting is a very good way of ensuring a healthy body and longevity. On the other hand, snacking and preventing your blood sugar levels from dropping is a sure-fire way of getting obese, diabetes, and heart/vascular disease. Adding cancer to that list is not much of a stretch.

The main thrust of the New Scientist article, however, was that they think the immune system DOES recognise cancer cells. The problem is, there is a cascade needed to fire up the immune system and, because you're not "unwell", your immune system is trying to fight off the cancer while it's on a "peacetime" footing.

That's the whole point behind the fever, or as I suggested, "catching flu". The immune system fires up in full force, and as a side effect of firing up to fight the flu, the cancer-fighting cells get fired up too. Which is why BCG is apparently used for some cancers - as a vaccine it triggers a feverish immune response.

Cheers,
Wol

Miracle Cure?

Posted May 6, 2014 22:39 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The essence of that article (assuming it's the same recent one I'm thinking of) is that cancers evolve to suppress the immune system. The relevant bits of the immune system do indeed recognize that something is wrong (after all, the cancer cells are displaying all sorts of weird crap on their surfaces, likely including a pile of foetal proteins that should *never* be displayed to a mature immune system), so it starts to sound the alarm, and then gets suppressed, and wham, the signalling cascade is blocked before it starts.

Obviously, as with everything else cancer does, this suppression is a reuse of things the body does in other conditions, which are then desirable: it's part of a crucial general defence mechanism against immune hyperactivity -- you can't really call it "autoimmune disorders" because autoimmune disorders are never this bad. Mice bred with immune systems that lack the receptor for that suppressor die in days.

Everything I've read about the fever thing suggests that it messes up cancer cells both by generally firing up the immune system (making it that bit harder to suppress) and *also* by raising body temperature: cancers, like virally infected cells though for different reasons, are notably worse at dealing with elevated temperature than normal cells.