Fighting cancer by putting tumor cells on a diet
npr.org
npr.org
I would highly recommend people do their own research into nutrition and its relation to health, along with the proven/likely/possible health benefits of various plants, spices and dietary patterns.
The fact is, our Big Pharma/FDA/IP-driven approach to medicine makes it almost impossible to test and profit off something like garlic, or a low glycemic index diet or intermittent fasting or turmeric or fruit and fiber or astragalus, etc.
The necessary research is just not occurring, because corporate/govt $ are poured into finding synthetic, patentable compounds to target specific problems after they occur.
General lifestyle/nutrition advice to prevent/mitigate a huge spectrum of issues that occur as we age? Ain't no money in that science.
Blatantly obvious how the same thing occurs w/ psychotropic compounds, with millions being poured into synthetic cannabinoids, opiates, serotonergics, etc. almost all of which are medically inferior to and more dangerous than the natural compounds they mimic. The system is not designed around efficacy, but patentability.
That's patently false. The vast majority of cancer funding does not come from industry or private interests, but from government or non-profit sources.
If I can convince my PI that garlic or a low glycemic index diet can improve survival outcomes in an inducible cancer mouse model, then I'd be grinding garlic and putting mice on starvation diets for the next 2 years.
Most drugs comes from private companies, not public institutions. It's about a 2/3 private and 1/3 public split. Note, that's discovery, not development. Private companies almost exclusively bring discoveries to market.
Second, yes, if garlic cured cancer drug companies could make money off of it. Isolate the active compounds, optimize it for efficacy and patent it. Kind of what they've already done for antibiotics, antifungals, anticholesterols and anticancer drugs. It's nothing new.
My point still stands, private funding is not the bottle-neck. If garlic or low glycemic index diets actually made a difference in overall survival, it would mostly likely be discovered in a publicly funded institution. A private institution would then jump on the opportunity to "discover" and develop a small molecule that is suitable for drugging and IP'ing based on the findings of the public lab.
I don't think there is a simple solution for that, but I can tell you is that these economics still won't prevent the discovery of such treatments. Some initial proof of this is the fact that the scientific community has embraced the concept that cancer is extremely heterogenous and will require a unique treatment for each individual patient (which has generated the "personalised medicine" buzzword).
It is not as clear sometimes. Private companies provide grants to professors and departments in public colleges for research related to their drugs. Is that included in "private" or "public" in the 2/3-1/3 split? Because depending on which side you'd argue on, you can make it flip flop.
"Well it is public because these are employees of public institutions and their time and effort is spent researching drugs for private pharma companies, instead of say teaching or doing other research". Or one can say "It is private, because the pharma companies pay for it". Now I don't know which is more likely but just thought, that would be an interesting point to look at.
[1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=h04&c...
There has been plenty of research on how dieting increases longevity, and reduces the propensity to catch various diseases such as cancer.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-o...
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-o...
as for good advices - i don't think anybody literate in this world doesn't know that being active and doing sports is a massive net benefit to individual. same goes for generally healthy diet - vegetables, fruit, not eating too much, limit sweet stuff and so on.
yet when I look around, I see people trying to blame others, blame evil corps, doing a lot of similar mental work except the very thing that everybody knows is healthy - or why isn't everybody who is able regularly exercising? if I give up on my body, mkay that's called freedom, but damn I won't go around and try to blame corn industry of some crazy conspiracy (even if there would be one). I am the one shopping for food, and healthy in supermarkets ain't so expensive. In fact, many times it's dirt cheap.
until somebody forces my hand to pay for the food i don't want to eat and forces it down my throat, we are free in our choices, and it's only our responsibility to make them as good as possible.
I think history has proven they can make money marketing anything. I thought this was the land of entrepreneurship?
It's interesting that the comment that is most conspiracy driven is voted to the top.
It's not Pharma or the FDA. Why would a company selling garlic extract want to run a trial to prove that their one product doesn't work? The number of people using it would probably barely increase if the result is positive, and if the result is negative they will go out of business.
If the US had single-payer healthcare, the focus likely would be much more on prevention, because that would mean the government would get to directly save more money on healthcare. It would also encourage the government to put more money into research that the private pharma companies aren't doing, like you said.
Where do I get the massive amounts of money I would need to run a valid nutrition study?
Or do you mean reading papers? How do I, without the time to get a degree, sort through all of the literature of a field where it seems even experts cannot agree?
In addition, cancer treatments like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation affect the sense of taste, appetite and metabolism and make it difficult to get normal nutrition in the first place.
So you can see why clinical oncologists and patients might be wary of restrictive diets or fasting. In fact many offical guidelines suggest adding sugar, frying foods, eating more dairy, etc to boost nutritional intake.
Psychologically, even if a patient is overweight they may fear a drop in weight as a sign that the cancer is progressing. (An ex-colleague was very obese and lost 60kg before/after being diagnosed with kidney cancer).
A patient may also want to enjoy their remaining time. Food has a huge intrinsic pleasure and is very important socially.
I'm not saying this is an unworthy line of research but they will need good evidence or specific, easy interventions to convince people to change their diet. For example, drugs like metformin or rMETase may be easier than explicit restrictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_androgen_receptor_mo...
To usher in an age of 10 billion dollar companies we need predictive validity and models. The ships are fast but the compasses are off.
The gut and controlling it/experimenting with it are the next big leap for biopharmacetuical development.
The way to get there is to enforce patient adherence to specific ingredient controlled diets.The only way to do that is control and know the environment of ingredients.
Check out this company that takes tumor biopsies and uses M3 polypeptide count to figure out what not to consume. http://www.immunodiet.com
Food avoidance unfortunately isn't something you can commercialize, at least not easily, specifically for patient treatment. There's also no way to push it through a clinical trial/ there's no such thing as an FDA approved diet.
Check out this diet: http://bit.ly/fodmapfree that has been shown to reduce the effects of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Probably extremely effective but difficult to get FDA approved.
There is debate between two schools of thought. On one side, Vander Heiden suggests that tumours must be attacked not only in the mitochondrial level (where the ketogenic diet has been suggested as part of a metabolic-based treatment) but also in the cell replication that we traditionally associate cancer with - where chemotherapy helps. He also blames genetic factors, i.e. we can still "inherit" a high cancer risk.
On the other side, Thomas Seyfried argues it's all ultimately mitochondrial and can be controlled via diet. The keto diet, and others, lowers the glucose intake of the body and helps to shut off the fuel supply for tumours. Since he argues cancer is ultimately a metabolic problem, shutting off the glucose supply is a possible cure.
Very interesting stuff.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-06/uosc-fts06021...
http://michelsonmedical.org/2014/12/26/igf-1-fasting-discuss...
https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-...
That said, it is quite true that most of what is said and done in connection with diet is some variety of nonsense, driven by self-interest on the part of market participants. Cui bono is the watchword. This just makes it more important to learn how to tell the difference between good research and junk science, however.
I'm currently sitting in a room at Sloan-Kettering dealing with a post-surgical infection from getting the left side of my liver lopped off. There've been no dietary restrictions or recommendations other than eat more protein. Initially I was told to up my vitamin d:
http://meetinglibrary.asco.org/content/139861-158
Its also been expressed to me that for my specific cancer (stage IV colon cancer with liver metastasis) surgery is the only curative mechanism.
From the abstract: The standard viewpoint that cancer is a genetic disease is often stated as a fact rather than a theory. By not acknowledging that it is a theory, namely the Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT), researchers are limiting their progress. An attractive alternative to SMT is the tissue organization field theory (TOFT), which is summarized as "development gone awry." ... Thinking in terms of TOFT can spur new lines of research; examples are given related to the early detection of cancer.
From the discussion : The premises of TOFT are that carcinogenesis represents a problem of tissue organization, comparable to organogenesis, and that proliferation is the default state of all cells (9,10). Three corollaries of TOFT are: 1) mutations are not needed for carcinogenesis; 2) cancer can arise in tissue where carcinogen has not been applied; and 3) genetic instability is a byproduct of carcinogenesis.
If I got cancer I would definitely have the cancer sequenced and go looking in the data for defects amenable to dietary intervention.
If I was in the same position, given the option of doing no chemo and dying; doing chemo, suffering, then dying; or doing no chemo, going on a diet, and maybe somehow it works...I know what I would chose.
Except in the process you're also putting your body through extremely unnecessary strain.