The Meta - Stats were saying as much and this lays out the arguments. We may find the royal road to an actual cure itself. At least now it becomes obvious why all other work has failed miserably.
It also points to why we do have efficacious natural compounds that helps the body cure itself. What it does underline is that damaging the immune system is bone stupid. The body is already in the business of eliminating cancer cells and challenging the immune system is hardly indicated. Throw in fasting to power up the immune system and even that is a powerful anti cancer method.
We may now be much closer to seeing the end of cancer itself.
Are Cancer Stem Cells the Key to Discovering a Cure?
October 12th, 2018
By Sayer Ji
Contributing writer for Wake Up World
https://wakeup-world.com/2018/10/12/are-cancer-stem-cells-the-key-to-discovering-a-cure-2/
The root cause and potential cure for cancer is ignored by virtually all conventional oncologists despite an accumulating body of research that we already have the answer.
From the perspective of conventional
cancer treatment a diagnosis of multi-drug resistant cancer is
equivalent to a death sentence. By the time such a diagnosis occurs, the
patient’s body has been irreversibly damaged by chemotherapy and radiation, and an even more aggressive cancer has emerged to take the place of the original one.
Tragically, these treatments do not simply fail, but make the cancers more malignant. This
fact is effectively concealed by the name multidrug resistant cancer
which makes it seem as if the cancer was so exceptionally resistant and
malignant that the normally effective drugs used to treat it just
couldn’t do the job.
But wouldn’t it be more accurate to call
this multi-drug failed cancer, putting the responsibility back on the
medical establishment, as it should be, in recognition of the impotence,
or worse, cancer-promoting nature of its treatment choices?
In other words, instead of blaming the
treatment failure on the patient’s body – or a set of virulent gene
mutations within their cancer – it is time we look more closely at why
conventional chemotherapy and radiation-based treatments
breed multidrug resistance within the cancer of patients, who
ultimately succumb to the effects of the treatment and not the cancer
they were originally diagnosed with.
How Conventional Cancer Treatment Creates Greater Malignancy
Multidrug resistant cancer is the
byproduct of cancer doctors (oncologists) throwing the chemical and
radiological kitchen sink at the patient and not only failing to improve
their condition, but significantly worsening it. How so? In order to
understand how conventional treatment drives the cancer into greater
malignancy, we must first understand what cancer is.
Tumors are actually highly organized
assemblages of cells, which are surprisingly well-coordinated for cells
that are supposed to be the result of strictly random mutation. They are
capable of building their own blood supply (angiogenesis), are able to
defend themselves by silencing cancer-suppression genes, secreting
corrosive enzymes to move freely throughout the body, alter their
metabolism to live in low oxygen and acidic environments, and know how
to remove their own surface-receptor proteins to escape detection by
white blood cells. In a previous article titled “Is Cancer An Ancient Survival Program Unmasked?“,
we delved deeper into this emerging view of cancer as an evolutionary
throw-back and not a byproduct of strictly random mutation.
Because tumors are not simply the result
of one or more mutated cells “going rogue” and producing exact clones
of itself (multi-mutational and clonal hypotheses), but are a diverse
group of cells having radically different phenotypal characteristics,
chemotherapy and radiation will affect each cell type differently.
Tumors are composed of a wide range of cells, many of which are entirely benign.
The most deadly cell type within a tumor or blood cancer, known as cancer stem cells (CSCs), has the ability to give rise to all the cell types found within that cancer.
They are capable of dividing by mitosis
to form either two stem cells (increasing the size of the stem
population), or one daughter cell that goes on to differentiate into a
variety of cell types, and one daughter cell that retains stem-cell
properties.
This means CSCs are tumorigenic
(tumor-forming) and should be the primary target of cancer treatment
because they are capable of both initiating and sustaining cancer. They
are also increasingly recognized to be the cause of relapse and
metastasis following conventional treatment.
CSCs are exceptionally resistant to conventional treatment for the following reasons:
- CSCs account for less than 1 in 10,000 cells within a particular cancer, making them difficult to destroy without destroying the vast majority of other cells comprising the tumor.[1]
- CSCs are slow to replicate, making them less likely to be destroyed by chemotherapy and radiation treatments that target cells which are more rapidly dividing.
- Conventional chemotherapies target differentiated and differentiating cells, which form the bulk of the tumor, but these are unable to generate new cells like the CSCs which are undifferentiated.
The existence of CSCs explains why
conventional cancer treatment has completely missed the boat when it
comes to targeting the root cause of tumors. One reason for this is
because existing cancer treatments have mostly been developed in animal
models where the goal is to shrink a tumor. Because mice are most often
used and their life spans do not exceed two years, tumor relapse is very
difficult, if not impossible to study.
The first round of chemotherapy never
kills the entire tumor, but only a percentage. This phenomenon is called
the fractional kill. The goal is to use repeated treatment cycles
(usually six) to regress the tumor population down to zero, without
killing the patient.
What normally occurs is that the
treatment selectively kills the less harmful populations of cells
(daughter cells), increasing the ratio of CSCs to benign and/or less
malignant cells. This is not unlike what happens when antibiotics are
used to treat certain infections. The drug may wipe out 99.9% of the
target bacteria, but .1% have or develop resistance to the agent,
enabling the .1% to come back even stronger with time.
The antibiotic, also, kills the other
beneficial bacteria that help the body fight infection naturally, in the
same way that chemotherapy kills the patient’s immune system (white
blood cells and bone marrow), ultimately supporting the underlying
conditions making disease recurrence more likely.
The reality is that the chemotherapy,
even though it has reduced the tumor volume, by increasing the ratio of
CSCs to benign daughter cells, has actually made the cancer more
malignant.
Radiotherapy has
also been shown to increase cancer stem cells in the prostate,
ultimately resulting in cancer recurrence and worsened
prognosis.[2] Cancer stem cells may also explain why castration therapy
often fails in prostate cancer treatment.[3]
Non-Toxic Natural Substances Which Target and Kill CSCs
Natural compounds have been shown to
exhibit three properties which make them suitable alternatives to
conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy:
- High margin of safety: Relative to chemotherapy agents such as 5-fluorouracil natural compounds are two orders of magnitude safer
- Selective Cytotoxicity: The ability to target only those cells that are cancerous and not healthy cells
- CSCs Targeting: The ability to target the cancer stem cells within a tumor population.
The primary reason why these substances are not used in conventional treatment is because they are not patentable, nor profitable.
Sadly, the criteria for drug selection are not safety, effectiveness,
accessibility and affordability. If this were so, natural compounds
would form an integral part of the standard of care in modern cancer
treatment.
Research indicates that the following compounds (along with common dietary sources) have the ability to target CSCs:
- Curcumin (Turmeric)
- Resveratrol (Red Wine; Japanese Knotweed)
- Quercetin (Onion)
- Sulforaphane (Broccoli sprouts)
- Parthenolide (Butterbur)
- Andrographalide (Andrographis)
- Genistein (Cultured Soy; Coffee)
- Piperine (Black Pepper)
Additional research found on the GreenMedInfo.com Multidrug Resistance page indicates over 50 compounds inhibit multidrug resistance cancers in experimental models.
References:
[1] Human
acute myeloid leukemia is organized as a hierarchy that originates from
a primitive hematopoietic cell. Nat Med. 1997 Jul ;3(7):730-7. PMID: 9212098
[2] Long-term recovery of irradiated
prostate cancer increases cancer stem cells. Prostate. 2012 Apr 18. Epub
2012 Apr 18. PMID: 22513891
[3] Stem-Like Cells with Luminal
Progenitor Phenotype Survive Castration in Human Prostate Cancer. Stem
Cells. 2012 Mar 21. Epub 2012 Mar 21. PMID: 22438320
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