Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Peter Dow on 09/10/2013 18:34:21
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Suggesting a scientific approach and method for the medical treatment of tumorous cancer.
Summary
A scientific approach and method for the medical treatment and cure for tumorous cancer disease is suggested and described.
The desired performance characteristics of suitable types of biological agents and pharmaceutical drugs and an appropriate method of employing those agents and drugs for the treatment and cure of cancer is described.
Caution
Neither the selection of specific agents and drugs, nor the determination of the optimal treatment regimes are described herein because the details for how best to implement the author’s general approach and method to cure cancer still require further research by the scientific and medical community which it is hoped this scientific paper will inform and inspire.
So the reader should be cautioned that the author does not herein publish detailed suggestions for oncologists to prescribe for their cancer patients which pills to pop when. The author is a scientist who is trying to find a cure for everyone one day, not a doctor who can cure someone today.
Invitation to informed discussion
This is claimed to be a realistic scientific paper, not a snake-oil-style cure-all claim. This may not be obvious to everyone because I am an amateur independent scientist, neither employed as a scientist, nor published in traditional scientific journals.
I have published widely on the internet on mostly non-scientific topics and I am accustomed to debating my ideas on-line and so I’m quite comfortable inviting replies perhaps as helpful comments and criticisms from fellow scientists and I can also take questions from any cancer specialists, doctors or other informed parties who take an educated interest in such matters.
Approach and method
One type of biological agent and 3 types of drugs are utilised in 2 distinct treatment phases, perhaps with an intermission between phase 1 and phase 2 of the treatment to review that the goals of phase 1 treatment have been reached before moving on to phase 2.
Treatment Phase 1
It is proposed that phase 1 use a mild anaerobic biological agent (with the suggestion that this is mostly likely to be a selection of a mild, treatable, non-drug-resistant anaerobic bacteria, sourced from a well-characterised laboratory specimen) with which the cancer patient is purposefully infected and 1 type of drug, matched to be a known effective treatment capable in high doses of eliminating the selected bio-agent from the body or in small doses to moderate the intensity of the infection.
During phase 1 treatment, after purposeful infection with the known mild anaerobic bio-agent, the anti-bio-agent drug is administered but only sufficiently to moderate and limit the intensity and systemic effects of the intended mild infection on the patient yet not overly administered to the point that the bio-agent is destroyed in-vivo before it has it has completed the designed treatment objectives of phase 1 treatment.
In phase 1 of treatment, the expectation would be that the patient’s own immune response will be fighting the bio-agent and so the course of the infection must be monitored and bio-agent and drug doses continuously adjusted to maintain a mild infection.
The objectives of phase 1 treatment
The bio-agent is selected with intention that the infection should establish itself in any anaerobic cores of cancer tumours and be supervised there while the infection attacks and in due course kills those cancerous body cells in any and all anaerobic tumour cores in the patient’s body.
The mild anaerobic bio-agent is selected and managed in-vivo so that it cannot be active, only dormant, in most of the aerobic environments of the body which are routinely supplied with oxygen via the blood, and so an appropriate selection and controlled bio-agent should not harm typical body cells so long as the infection is constrained to be mild with limited systemic effects on the body.
The selected bio-agent is not intended to harm those cancer cells which are growing and dividing in an aerobic environment whether in peripheral parts of all tumours or in aerobic tumour cores which are have grown their own blood supply vessels.
The dangers of a failed phase 1 treatment
Too much bio-agent
Inappropriate selection of a drug-resistant bio-agent, neglecting to moderate the intensity of the infection with sufficient drugs or a patient’s weak immune system failing to eliminate the infection at the conclusion of phase 1 of treatment could lead to a run-away infection causing serious and life-threatening infection or death.
Too little bio-agent
Administering insufficient bio-agent, over-use of drugs or a particularly active immune system could lead to the bio-agent failing to establish itself in all anaerobic tumour cores and a failed attempted phase 1 treatment leaving viable anaerobic tumour cores which would inevitably wreck the hopes for a successful outcome to any attempted phase 2 treatment.
Treatment phase 2
It is proposed that two types of pharmaceutical drug are employed in phase 2 treatment and let’s call them type H drugs ("H" for “Halt cell division!” ) and Type K drugs ("K" for “Kill diving cells”).
Type H drugs - Halt cell division!
At this time, the author does not know if type H drugs are ever used in medicine or indeed are even yet known to medical or biological science. However, this author does not want to wait for that research to be done but rather feels that a “Eureka” moment must be seized and acted upon and the time to publish is now.
Administered on their own, type H drugs are apparently useless medically and apparently harmful so such type H drugs may not have been developed and produced for medical purposes and so may never be available to use medically until someone explains what such drugs could be used for. One of the main points of this paper is to make the case for producing type H drugs so that if they are not now available, the pharmaceutical industry can get busy making them available! What is described here is what H-type drugs are supposed to be able to do.
Type H-drugs utilise and are intended temporarily to saturate the normal cell-signalling pathways which instruct normal cells not to divide. Normal cells with the exception of cancer cells pay heed to such cell to cell signals and it is the defining characteristic of a cancer cell that it ignores such signals not to divide and keeps on dividing regardless.
The purpose of administering a H-type drug is to temporarily overload the normal signals and order an artificial system-wide cessation of all normal cell division in the body. Accordingly, normal cells which frequently divide - skin cells, intestinal wall cells, immune response cells, bone marrow cells, reproductive organ cells etc are tricked into stopping dividing temporarily, so long as the H-type drug is administered.
Type-H drugs operate in a pharmaceutically reversible way and when the H-type drug clears from the body then the normal body cells which have dutifully followed the artificial signals and temporarily ceased dividing then go back to their normal operation without any permanent damage to the cell.
Clearly, the administration of type-H drugs weakens the body systematically which depends on routine cell division and for so long as type H remains in-vivo then harm to the body’s health will accumulate.
Type-H drugs don’t do the body any good on their own. Not only that, but for the purpose of treating cancer, type-H drugs do nothing directly to cancer cells either which are oblivious to the cell signalling pathways which type-H drugs are designed to stimulate.
Type K drugs - Kill dividing cells
In order to understand the utility of type-H drugs one has to consider their medical use in conjunction with Type K ( “Kill dividing cells” ) drugs. Type K drugs are known to medical science. They have been used to try to treat cancer but the problem with them is that they tend to kill all dividing cells, not just cancer cells.
OK, well the smarter reader will see by now where we are going with Type H drugs. After administration of a Type H drug which suspends normal cell division but does not affect cancer cell division, the administration of the Type K drug is now a no-brainer. The dividing cancer cells get killed by the Type K drug. The normally dividing cells don’t get killed by the Type K drug because they are no longer dividing thanks to the administration of the Type H drug.
After the dividing cancer cells have died all that remains to be done is to clear the Type K drug from the body while the Type H drug is still in operation. Then later it is safe to discontinue the Type H drug at which point the body will resume normal cell division, free from cancer.
The dangers of a failed phase 2 treatment
The patient will be rendered vulnerable to infectious disease because of the predictable effect of the Type H drug which will prevent parts of the immune system from responding to infections. Worse case of course is that an opportunist infection may kill the patient.
If the Type H drug is not as effective as intended, if the dose is too low, if it is too quickly cleared from the body then the Type K drug will kill normally dividing body cells as well which cripple multiple body functions which depend on dividing cells and worst case kill the patient.
Without a successful phase 1 treatment which has previously killed anaerobic tumour cores, phase 2 treatment will only kill cancer cells dividing in aerobic environments leaving any and all remaining viable anaerobic tumour cores to provide an inexhaustible supply of cancer cells into the aerobic parts of the body. Phase 2 on its own cannot cure cancer; only after a successful phase 1 can it do that.
Conclusion
The Type H drugs are the biggest uncertainly in the author’s mind but if they can be sourced and can work as described then conceptually this looks like an excellent scientific approach and method for the cure of tumorous cancers.
Credits
Thank you to all those from whom I have learned so much.
Dedication
This cure for cancer paper is dedicated to my mother who lives still and to the memory of all my friends and relatives who have died from cancer for whom this cure is too little and too late.
This cure for cancer paper is also dedicated to Condoleezza Rice who has inspired me to understand that I may not be able to control my circumstances as a scientist without employment as such but I can control how I react to my circumstances. Condi’s mother also died from cancer and she has participated in Race for the Cure events.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Flatimesblogs.latimes.com%2Fwashington%2Fimages%2F2009%2F03%2F23%2Fcondiricerace4cure06apkevinwolf.jpg&hash=0b7ae1b874a749a607baf1d15593861a)
Prizes.
I do not want the Nobel Prize for Medicine or indeed any Nobel prize so long as Sweden remains governed as a kingdom. I want nothing from the Swedish King nor from any King nor Queen.
I am a republican and only wish to receive prizes, awards or recognition while living or posthumously from republics or at least from non “royal” institutions which find themselves in the unfortunate circumstance of operating as I do inside a country currently governed as a kingdom.
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"I do not want the Nobel Prize for Medicine "
I don't see that as a problem.
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There has actually been research into injecting antigens into tumors. For example injecting antigens from some common molds which the body mounts a vigorous response to. I don't think one needs to inject "live organisms". And, using something that the body already recognizes, one doesn't have to add any medication to treat this secondary infection.
Each cancer, of course, is different and the treatment should be customized to the individual. Resection is also important in the treatment of many cancers as it is important to reduce the tumor load.
The stage of the cancer is also important, so a cancer that is 100% local and contained within the source tissue may be effectively treated with resection, while a cancer that is already metastatic must be treated as a systemic disease (and thus developing a "vaccine" equivalent is much more useful).
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"I do not want the Nobel Prize for Medicine "
I don't see that as a problem.
Hmm. Well if you don't see kingdoms as a problem then you won't see the prizes awarded by kingdoms as an aspect of the same "kingdom problem" either.
I assume that you as a chemist, are not also a political scientist and so you don't understand the cause and effect mechanisms between the typical misgovernment of a kingdom cause and the human disaster effects.
For example, the chemist Nobel's invention of dynamite had military uses but a kingdom whose king or dictator is not a president who is dutifully upholding a democratic republican constitution but rather is a war mongering leader and with a more powerful military, a kingdom or empire or reich is a threat to humanity and so a problem.
For example, if the Japanese emperor or the Nazi dictator Hitler who was a king in all but name, had scientists who had developed nuclear weapons in advance of the Americans and used those nukes to win world war 2 then the outcome for humanity would have been a problem.
So it matters who scientists work for and in general we ought to be working for the most enlightened governments around and not selling our talents to the highest bidder for the short term gain a prize offers.
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One minor reason why I don't see it as a problem is that the Nobel prize isn't awarded, or paid for, by the Swedish royalty. (The Nobel Foundation is based on pacifism. On that basis I don't think it's me who doesn't "understand the cause and effect mechanisms between the typical misgovernment of a kingdom cause and the human disaster effects.")
The major reason is that your post doesn't actually say anything.
In essence it says "If we treat someone with drugs and bugs that destroy cancer then we will have a cancer cure".
True, but not newsworthy.
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The medical argument is interesting. The anoxic natuere of hard tumors has always been seen as a problem (it makes then less susceptible to radiation damage than healthy tissue) and it's kinda fun to treat it as a solution.
As for the politics, I have only two words for any putative republican: "President Blair". Life in Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bhutan, Tonga.... all seem fairly pleasant compared with many republics (Greece? Who actually runs the Irish Republic - the church or the banks? certainly not the president or parliament). For sheer stinking corruption and incompetence, you'd have to look under a lot of rocks and dungheaps to find a king worse than George W Bush.
About 10 years ago I attended a Buckingham Palace garden party. Security consisted of Girl Guides collecting tickets at the gate, and one armed policeman on the roof. Can you imagine any US president, or indeed the head of any republic (Ireland excepted, perhaps) being able to wander through a crowd of 2000 strangers and actually talk to some of them without a cohort of heavies and helicopters? And who pays the bill? Constitutional royalty is cheap and effective.
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There has actually been research into injecting antigens into tumors. For example injecting antigens from some common molds which the body mounts a vigorous response to. I don't think one needs to inject "live organisms". And, using something that the body already recognizes, one doesn't have to add any medication to treat this secondary infection.
Well the advantage of the live organism is that it can attack the tumours by infecting their hypoxic cores, killing and devouring some of the tumour cells, situated within the hard-to-reach hypoxic cores of tumours, entirely on its own, with no intervention from the host immune system cells which have a difficulty operating in hypoxic environments.
An "antigen" does nothing by itself to tumour cells and the immune response is only guaranteed to be against the antigen, not against the cells the antigen is injected in close proximity to.
Also you can't inject antigen accurately at all the sites of a large number of small tumours. The advantage of a circulating live organism is that it will seek out locations in the body where it can thrive.
So I'm all for "research" but I suspect this is researching an approach which will not work, will not provide a cure, not on most occasions.
Each cancer, of course, is different and the treatment should be customized to the individual.
Yes OK but the treatment needs to work. Customising a treatment that doesn't work, is pointless.
Resection is also important in the treatment of many cancers as it is important to reduce the tumor load.
The stage of the cancer is also important, so a cancer that is 100% local and contained within the source tissue may be effectively treated with resection, while a cancer that is already metastatic must be treated as a systemic disease (and thus developing a "vaccine" equivalent is much more useful).
Well my approach is designed to cure cancers that have already spread and must be treated as a systemic disease.
My approach is not really a "vaccine" approach. With this approach the role of the immune system is merely to contain the bio-agent to hypoxic areas of the body and specifically the areas of interest are hypoxic tumour cores. The immune system is assisted in that task with the measured administration of an anti-bio-agent antibiotic. That's the only job the immune system needs to do as regards this cure.
It is simply an unlikely fortuitous outcome if the immune system learns to recognise the cancer cells as antigenic because of the actions of the bio-agent bringing immune cells to the vicinity of tumours. The approach does not rely on that happening.
The phase 1 treatment goals are limited to killing cancer cells in hypoxic tumour cores. The immune system can remain naive with respect to the cancer cells and still the cure is effected after both phases of treatment are complete.
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One minor reason why I don't see it as a problem is that the Nobel prize isn't awarded, or paid for, by the Swedish royalty. (The Nobel Foundation is based on pacifism. On that basis I don't think it's me who doesn't "understand the cause and effect mechanisms between the typical misgovernment of a kingdom cause and the human disaster effects.")
Well pacifism or military unpreparedness in kingdoms is equally a problem as inappropriate war-mongering. Sometimes you need excellent republican leadership to wage an early war to nip a growing danger in the bud.
What we saw in the face of the growing danger of the Nazis pre-world war 2 was appeasement, pacifism and military incompetence by the European kingdoms. Denmark I believe resisted Nazi invasion for only 2 hours. Sweden was neutral in that war. Norway was invaded and peace prizes don't defend a country from invasion.
Sweden should ask its neighbour Finland, a republic, how to defend itself against an aggressor. Finland a tiny country yet it resisted aggressive invasion by the Soviet Red Army remarkably effectively. Imagine the course of the world war if all countries had defended their independence so ferociously.
Well neutrality was not a fault only of European kingdoms - Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland were two neutral republican countries. So weak or poorly led republics are as useless as weak kingdoms in many respects.
Anyway I digress. Let's keep the rest of this on topic shall we? I've stated my wishes for any prizes going and let's leave the political debate for another topic, shall we?
The major reason is that your post doesn't actually say anything.
In essence it says "If we treat someone with drugs and bugs that destroy cancer then we will have a cancer cure".
True, but not newsworthy.
Well let's now switch to consideration of that question - whether my approach is worthy of any prizes?
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The medical argument is interesting.
Thank you.
The anoxic natuere of hard tumors has always been seen as a problem (it makes then less susceptible to radiation damage than healthy tissue) and it's kinda fun to treat it as a solution.
Less susceptible to chemotherapy too because those cancer cells embedded in hypoxic tumour cores aren't dividing and drugs which target dividing cells don't work either.
My approach is to eliminate the hypoxic cores as reservoirs of dormant or quiescent cancer cells first, in phase 1 of treatment, before then targeting dividing cancer cells in phase 2 of treatment.
As for the politics, I have only two words for any putative republican: "President Blair".
Hmm. Are you assuming republicans would settle for one republic for the whole of the territory currently governed as the United Kingdom?
Not so because revolutionary republicans reserve the right for any nation to establish its own republic. So nations which refused to be governed as a part of a republic under any president of any multi-national state could secede, break-away and have for example Scottish, English, Welsh etc republics.
It simply won't wash when royalists try to scare monger republicans with the threat of one of their kingdom's prime ministers as president.
Life in Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bhutan, Tonga.... all seem fairly pleasant compared with many republics
(Greece? Who actually runs the Irish Republic - the church or the banks? certainly not the president or parliament). For sheer stinking corruption and incompetence, you'd have to look under a lot of rocks and dungheaps to find a king worse than George W Bush.
About 10 years ago I attended a Buckingham Palace garden party. Security consisted of Girl Guides collecting tickets at the gate, and one armed policeman on the roof. Can you imagine any US president, or indeed the head of any republic (Ireland excepted, perhaps) being able to wander through a crowd of 2000 strangers and actually talk to some of them without a cohort of heavies and helicopters? And who pays the bill? Constitutional royalty is cheap and effective.
Well I and many others haven't found life pleasant at all under the jackboot of UK rule but as a royalist you would no doubt be indifferent to the suffering of innocents at the hands of the Queen's officers? Anyway, in this topic, let's agree to disagree and move on to the medical science.
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The major reason is that your post doesn't actually say anything.
In essence it says "If we treat someone with drugs and bugs that destroy cancer then we will have a cancer cure".
True, but not newsworthy.
Well let's now switch to consideration of that question - whether my approach is worthy of any prizes?
No.
Because, as I said, it doesn't really say anything.
It will also fall over because there are lots of parts of the body that are relatively anaerobic and the proposed bacteria would damage them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_gangrene
BTW, next time, try not introducing irrelevant politics into things. It's not going to help and linking Nobel prizes to royalty just makes you look silly.
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Type H drugs - Halt cell division!
At this time, the author does not know if type H drugs are ever used in medicine or indeed are even yet known to medical or biological science. However, this author does not want to wait for that research to be done but rather feels that a “Eureka” moment must be seized and acted upon and the time to publish is now.
It appears that what I have referred to as "Type H drugs" and "growth factor blockers" look to be my redundant names for "growth factor inhibitors" (half a million hits on google!) and "growth factor receptor inhibitors". (700,000 hits!). Though I note that "growth factor blocker" and "growth factor blockers" appear to be getting hundreds of thousands of hits now too - I thought I had tried that search term earlier and got nothing, maybe my typo or some problem with google?) Wow, 1.8 million hits for "growth factor receptor blockers"!
{Those are hits with the quotes included in the search term so those should be hits for the exact phrase. Sorry but my google links were playing up and I've removed them so you'll have to use your own initiative, perhaps copy and paste the search terms into your search box}
Inhibitors / blockers - same difference so I am content to use any of the names "Growth factor inhibitors" or "Growth factor receptor inhibitors" or "Growth factor blockers" or "Growth factor receptor blockers" from now on for this class of drugs.
So that's actually very encouraging for the early adoption of my approach to cure cancer because the drugs needed are not as "unknown" and "do not exist", as a class of drugs, after all.
That's not to say that all such growth factor blocker / inhibitor drugs which would be needed for the successful adoption of my approach are now available but it looks like some are available and hopefully the rest will be made available eventually.
I've found this wikipedia link -
EGFR inhibitor - redirecting to - Epidermal growth factor receptor - Clinical applications (http://"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=EGFR_inhibitor")
There doesn't yet seem to be a general Wikipedia page for "Growth factor inhibitor" or "Growth factor receptor inhibitor" or "Growth factor blocker" or "Growth factor receptor blocker". So that's something for me and other Wikipedia editors to think about coming up with. If we can at least start talking in a structured way about this class of drugs then that'll be progress.
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Half a million hits on google is probably enough to scupper your (rather optimistic) hopes of a prize.
There are ways to halt cell division.
Many of them, such as radiation or the alkylating agent drugs are used in the treatment of cancer.
(sorry, did you think you were going to get a prize for that idea?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkylating_antineoplastic_agent
for example.
Of course, unless you can come up with a way to ensure that they stop cancer cells but not normal cells then you don't have a treatment- you have a poison.
The "type K" drugs have, of course , the same problem.
In fact it's quite hard to tell them apart.
If you have breast cancer cells that are oestrogen dependent, and you use tamoxifen as a treatment
is that a type H or a type K response?
It's H if they just stop growing but type k if they go into apoptosis.
You probably won't be shocked to read that tamoxifen is widely used in treating some cancers (particularly breast cancers)
And it may not surprise you to find that combinations of all these ideas are already in use.
As I already said of your opening post:
In essence it says "If we treat someone with drugs and bugs that destroy cancer then we will have a cancer cure".
True, but not newsworthy.
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Abstract
A new 2-phase treatment to cure cancer is proposed.
Phase 1 would use a live bio-agent paired with a moderating anti-bio-agent drug to target and kill hypoxic cancer tumour cores.
Phase 2 would employ 2 drug types - firstly a mixture of drugs of the growth factor inhibitor type, some (perhaps most) yet to be developed, would be required to halt selectively all normal cell division but not halt the characteristically aberrant cancer cell division and secondly, conventional chemotherapy drugs would be used to target and kill only the dividing cancer cells.
There doesn't yet seem to be a general Wikipedia page for "Growth factor inhibitor" or "Growth factor receptor inhibitor" or "Growth factor blocker" or "Growth factor receptor blocker". So that's something for me and other Wikipedia editors to think about coming up with. If we can at least start talking in a structured way about this class of drugs then that'll be progress.
Update -
Wikipedia: Growth factor receptor inhibitor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_factor_receptor_inhibitor)
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It's still not going to work.
and this "conventional chemotherapy drugs would be used to target and kill only the dividing cancer cells." is true by tautology and thus meaningless.
Essentially you have said "if we have something that kills cancer cells, we will cure cancer."
Well, of course we will, but it offers no guarantee that such a material exists, nor does it tell us how to find one and it's what people have been seeking to do for decades.
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We can, of course, kill some of the cancer cells.
One of the big problems with cancer cells is their high mutation rate.
Kill 99% of the cancer cells off with your new "super-drug", and if the body doesn't manage to eradicate that remaining 1%, the disease will return with a vengeance, and the old super-drug will have absolutely no effect on the cancer.
That is why recurrent metastatic cancer is so troublesome, and a failed drug treatment regimen is generally not used again.
"Training the immune system" though, is currently being researched.
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The major reason is that your post doesn't actually say anything.
In essence it says "If we treat someone with drugs and bugs that destroy cancer then we will have a cancer cure".
True, but not newsworthy.
Well let's now switch to consideration of that question - whether my approach is worthy of any prizes?
No.
Because, as I said, it doesn't really say anything.
It will also fall over because there are lots of parts of the body that are relatively anaerobic and the proposed bacteria would damage them.
OK well let's examine that claim in detail.
Firstly, in the healthy body, our living cells are respiring aerobically for the most part. Evolution has provided animals with means, such blood, to circulate oxygen to our cells so that they can do so.
Now, even in the healthy body, the amount of dissolved oxygen does vary a bit from place to place; some parts are relatively highly saturated with oxygen, other parts relatively less saturated with oxygen. For example, venous blood has less dissolved oxygen than arterial blood.
In parts of the body where we don't have our living cells, such as inside the digestive tract, it's not a danger that the environment is hypoxic because anaerobic micro-organisms are already there playing a useful role for us, to make some vitamins the body needs.
Admitting that the oxygen saturation varies in parts of the body doesn't admit that any healthy parts of the body are hypoxic to the degree that they are vulnerable to infection by the bio-agent.
Even aerobic bacteria typically find it impossible to infect healthy parts of the body because of the various immune defences of the body - even if they get inside the body, they are easily mopped up by immune cells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_gangrene
But as can be read in that article, it is quite different in unhealthy damaged parts of the body, when the blood supply is interrupted and body cells are not getting the oxygen they need to fight off infections.
The bio-agent could only infect damaged parts of the body which already had necrotic tissue in which the bio-agent could proliferate - but could not infect healthy tissue.
The infection should be medically moderated by the use of the anti-bio-agent antibiotic drug so that the bio-agent doesn't suddenly make enough toxin in large tumours which could seep in high concentrations into neighbouring healthy tissue killing it. That's what the anti-bio-agent drug is for, that's why it is paired with the bio-agent so that the medical staff can moderate the infection only to the tumours.
BTW, next time, try not introducing irrelevant politics into things. It's not going to help and linking Nobel prizes to royalty just makes you look silly.
As I've said, I'm hoping to leave politics out of the rest of this topic but your claim that I look silly needs a reply.
The fact is that the Nobel prizes are awarded at a ceremony with the Swedish King having a prominent role. Scientists who turn up to such ceremonies, being seen hobnobbing with the royals, are allowing their hard-earned science reputation to be abused to support monarchy. I find that politically unwise and I'd never do it, never want to do it.
Now can we leave the politics out of the rest of this topic please?
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Half a million hits on google is probably enough to scupper your (rather optimistic) hopes of a prize.
Not really because those hits aren't for cures of cancer like I've presented here.
Yes those drugs are now used in the treatment of cancer but not in the way I propose. My way using a bigger set of those types of drugs, is better because it can cure a lot of cancers, permanently.
My way is not limited like the current way those drugs are used which is to control only a few kinds of cancers while never curing those cancers and leaving patients with a long-term drug dependency, with side-effects and risks.
There are ways to halt cell division.
True. My way is the way to cure cancer though. Other ways don't, or don't do so as easily.
Many of them, such as radiation or the alkylating agent drugs are used in the treatment of cancer.
(sorry, did you think you were going to get a prize for that idea?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkylating_antineoplastic_agent
for example.
Oh those drugs only stop cells dividing by killing them and they kill normal cells too, which gives very bad, long-lasting side-effects to the patient and even when a cure is obtained, a long period of intensive care and recovery is usually required. So any cure for cancer is better than none of course but my way can do better in future.
Those drugs might be suitable for consideration as my type K drugs. We do need such drugs to kill cancer cells but my approach uses type H drugs to stop normal cells dividing and hence stops the type K drugs from killing them.
Of course, unless you can come up with a way to ensure that they stop cancer cells but not normal cells then you don't have a treatment- you have a poison.
Well my way is not trying to stop cancer cells from dividing only. My way is to kill cancer cells.
My way uses type H drugs to stop normal cells from dividing so that they are not killed by the type K drugs which kill all dividing cells.
It's a new way and it looks like you are having some difficulty in getting your head around the concept I have come up with. You are still waiting for the penny to drop.
The "type K" drugs have, of course , the same problem.
In fact it's quite hard to tell them apart.
Quite because the type K drugs are precisely those traditional chemotherapy drugs. They do have a problem - they kill normal cells. My way gets around that problem by using type H drugs to stop normal cells dividing so that they are not targeted by type K drugs.
If you have breast cancer cells that are oestrogen dependent, and you use tamoxifen as a treatment
is that a type H or a type K response?
Neither.
Tamoxifen is an antagonist of the estrogen receptor in breast tissue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamoxifen) so the drug is indeed a growth factor receptor inhibitor which could potentially be used to provoke a type H response in some breast cancer types, yes.
However, Tamoxifen is typically used in keeping with the current approach towards using growth factor receptor inhibitors - namely to try to stop cancer cells from dividing. Tamoxifen is isn't typically used to stop only normal breast tissue cells from dividing, leaving cancer cells dividing in their characteristically aberrant fashion.
For example, let me explain how Tamoxifen might be used as a type H drug.
In some types of breast cancer, all the breast tissue cells will be stopped from growing by a high dose of Tamoxifen, whereas with a small dose of Tamoxifen, only the normal breast cells would be stopped from dividing and the cancer cells wouldn't be stopped significantly because in those cancers the cancer cells are not so sensitive to estrogen signaling mechanisms. Using a carefully calibrated smaller dose of the drug would be how to provoke an type H response if that were possible. Then killing the still dividing breast cancer cells with a type K drug could be part of a phase 2 treatment, except of course my approach would need a lot more type H drugs to protect the other types of cells in the body - skin, gut, bone marrow etc. - from the type K drug.
So it is an academic question in the absence of a broader set of type H drugs to use because the current approach using Tamoxifen will have its advantages over traditional chemotherapy that might well kill breast cancer but would do a lot of damage to the patient's health in the process, not to mention the intensive care required to get the patient through to recovery.
Some intractable types of breast cancer will not have cancer cells with estrogen receptors that differ in their dividing rates to dose levels of estrogen receptor inhibitors, such as Tamoxifen, from normal breast estrogen receptor cells and such types of cancer can't be made to provoke a type H drug response to such drugs. When such estrogen receptor inhibitor drugs are used against those intractable cancers, the drugs would either, at high dose, halt all estrogen receptor cells from dividing or, at low dose, allow all estrogen receptor cells to divide; then there's no happy medium dose to be found which could stop only the normal estrogen receptor cells from dividing. Those are the more intractable kinds of breast cancer against which my approach only offers limited treatment options.
On the other hand, some types of breast cancer in which the estrogen receptor cancer cells cannot be stopped from dividing no matter the dose of Tamoxifen are quite easily distinguished from normal estrogen receptor cells which can easily be stopped from dividing by Tamoxifen and those types of breast cancer can be treated successfully using my approach (whereas traditional Tamoxifen anti-cancer therapy is of no use against such cancers) as and when the set of type H drugs my approach requires are available.
Before you ask, I don't know what percentage of breast cancer types would show a type H drug response to Tamoxifen. It might be most, it might be few. I don't know enough about the drug. I've not had time to investigate the literature. Such a question would have to be researched. Even if unexpectedly Tamoxifen doesn't show a type H response at any dose that does not mean that other estrogen receptor inhibitor drugs would not do so for most breast cancers of estrogen receptor cells.
It's H if they just stop growing but type k if they go into apoptosis.
Not exactly. It's more like I described above.
You probably won't be shocked to read that tamoxifen is widely used in treating some cancers (particularly breast cancers)
Correct.
And it may not surprise you to find that combinations of all these ideas are already in use.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if my approach was already in use but it is not I believe. I cannot see how it can be in the absence of a wide set of type H drugs to target the different tissue types being available and I believe that currently the growth factor receptor inhibitor set of drugs is strictly limited in the tissue types which can be targeted.
As I already said of your opening post:
In essence it says "If we treat someone with drugs and bugs that destroy cancer then we will have a cancer cure".
True, but not newsworthy.
My approach is truly newsworthy because it provides a lot more useful details explaining a method of how to cure cancer in future than your claimed "essence" does.
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Just for a start re the bugs in the gut that "... make some vitamins the body needs. "
Nope, or we wouldn't need those vitamins in our diets. Not especially important,but it shows the quality of your understanding.
Also, re the quality of your debate "The fact is that the Nobel prizes are awarded at a ceremony with the Swedish King having a prominent role."
But what you said was "I am a republican and only wish to receive prizes, awards or recognition while living or posthumously from republics or at least from non “royal” institutions which find themselves in the unfortunate circumstance of operating as I do inside a country currently governed as a kingdom."
and that describes the Nobel institute quite well.
It isn't royal and it can hardly expect to oust the monarchy, not leave the country.
Would you like to set up a poll on whether or not that makes you look silly?
In any event, I don't see the issue troubling you any time soon.
"Admitting that the oxygen saturation varies in parts of the body doesn't admit that any healthy parts of the body are hypoxic to the degree that they are vulnerable to infection by the bio-agent.
"
Nope, but the fact that people get infected by anaerobic bacteria does show that "parts of the body are hypoxic to the degree that they are vulnerable to infection by the bio-agent"
It might have been better if you had looked at the wiki page I posted, discovered that obligate anaerobes are quite capable of damaging human muscle tissue etc, and gave up.
But, because you are so damned sure you are right, you ignored reality.
Well, that's not going to cut it on a science website.
BTW, re "But as can be read in that article, it is quite different in unhealthy damaged parts of the body, when the blood supply is interrupted and body cells are not getting the oxygen they need to fight off infections." the completely obvious point that you have missed is that the infection spreads to healthy tissue.
"The bio-agent could only infect damaged parts of the body which already had necrotic tissue in which the bio-agent could proliferate - but could not infect healthy tissue."
Because of magic?
That's just an assertion. Do you not realise you need evidence (and, before you start potentially poisoning people, pretty good evidence at that).
Similarly
"The infection should be medically moderated by the use of the anti-bio-agent antibiotic drug so that the bio-agent doesn't suddenly make enough toxin in large tumours which could seep in high concentrations into neighbouring healthy tissue killing it. "
requires a magic "anti-bio-agent antibiotic drug"
If you can make that magic drug which can distinguish between "bacterium in tumour = good" and "bacterium not in tumour=bad" then why not just use that selectivity directly on the tumour?
Why add the complication of a bacterium?
Do you really not see why your approach is bizarre?
"Yes those drugs are now used in the treatment of cancer but not in the way I propose."
that would be because the way you propose would kill the patient.
"My way gets around that problem by using type H drugs to stop normal cells dividing so that they are not targeted by type K drugs."
Again, if you could magically get that selectivity you should use it directly to kill the cancer cells.
You are relying on magic to do something the hard way, if the magic worked, why not use it the easy way.
You have got this
"Oh those drugs only stop cells dividing by killing them" the wrong way round.
We know how they kill cells. They do it by interfering with cell division.
That's how we know that interfering with cell division as you propose, would kill the patient.
Sadly, we know that because it has happened.
"My approach is truly newsworthy because it provides a lot more useful details explaining a method of how to cure cancer in future than your claimed "essence" does."
My word, you are full of yourself.
Anyway, since your proposal would kill the patient I don't see it getting adopted any time soon.
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It's still not going to work.
and this "conventional chemotherapy drugs would be used to target and kill only the dividing cancer cells." is true by tautology and thus meaningless.
Nope it follows that if normal, non-cancerous cells have all been stopped from dividing by the type H drugs which haven't stopped the cancer cells from dividing then the only cells which are still dividing are the cancerous cells. That's what type H drugs are supposed to do.
Now if the type H drugs succeed, then if the type K drugs kill all dividing cells then they are killing only all the cancerous cells, because the cancer cells are the only cells which are still dividing at that point.
If H works, then K kills the cancer cells only.
Of course if H doesn't work then K kills both types of cell.
So you are wrong to pull out part of my sentence and call that "a tautology", like saying "up is not down". No I'm not that stupid. You really need to read the whole sentence because the second part of the sentence is predicated on the first part.
Here, try again.
Phase 2 would employ 2 drug types - firstly a mixture of drugs of the growth factor inhibitor type, some (perhaps most) yet to be developed, would be required to halt selectively all normal cell division but not halt the characteristically aberrant cancer cell division and secondly, conventional chemotherapy drugs would be used to target and kill only the dividing cancer cells.
The "secondly" follows from the "firstly". The "secondly" is not a stand-alone claim.
If I say, "firstly I will make a cup of tea and secondly I will drink from that cup only tea." Then you can't complain about me saying I am going to drink only tea, because I have already said in "firstly" that tea was what I will make. You can't logically turn around and say I may be drinking coffee unless you question the truth of "firstly" and you didn't do that. You just questioned "secondly" without even remembering what I had said in "firstly". In one ear and out the other. For you, "firstly" is a long time ago in a galaxy far away and must never be thought of when reading "secondly". So it is you who is abandoning logic.
So by all means question my "firstly" and on that basis question "secondly" but if you don't question "firstly" then don't say "secondly" has faulty logic; have the logic to understand that "secondly" is a logical consequence of "firstly" if "firstly" is correct.
Essentially you have said "if we have something that kills cancer cells, we will cure cancer."
Well, of course we will, but it offers no guarantee that such a material exists, nor does it tell us how to find one and it's what people have been seeking to do for decades.
Well I have explained how my approach works to cure cancer.
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We can, of course, kill some of the cancer cells.
One of the big problems with cancer cells is their high mutation rate.
Mutation is a big issue in creating cancers in the first place, certainly.
However by far the biggest problem with cancer cells is that they divide a lot more than they die so the number of cancer cells is always increasing, until the point when you are at death's door and you can't eat enough even to feed the cancer cells in their growth.
Everything else about cancer cells is secondary, although the fact that they spread around the body, metastasise, is the biggest of the secondary issues with them otherwise as you pointed out before Clifford, simply remove a localised cancer surgically.
The stage of the cancer is also important, so a cancer that is 100% local and contained within the source tissue may be effectively treated with resection,
Correct.
If medicine can come up with a treatment which kills cancer cells anywhere in the body more quickly than they divide, if you can get cancer cell numbers going in a downward direction consistently then you can beat the cancer - in a nutshell that's the goal.
Now as for mutations, what is certainly known is that before a cancer becomes the cancer that kills you, the biggest factor is that its ancestor cells may have under gone a number of mutations - but those can happen over a number of years before you even know a cancer is in the making. If that is all that you meant Clifford then there's no doubt that cancer cells have mutated more down the generations of cell divisions compared to normal body cells which haven't mutated.
My expectation would be that once a cancer is spreading and growing then it will kill you (or be cured) before it gets another chance to mutate. It doesn't need to mutate again to kill you. It might mutate again but that's not the big concern if you have a treatment that kills all cancers.
Now Clifford, I'd be very interested to follow up any links you can post to information about cancers mutating after they have become cancers. Otherwise I don't have too much to say about that issue.
Kill 99% of the cancer cells off with your new "super-drug", and if the body doesn't manage to eradicate that remaining 1%, the disease will return with a vengeance, and the old super-drug will have absolutely no effect on the cancer.
Hmm. Well if I had a systemic treatment that had really killed 99% of the cancer cells, I'd be very hopeful that the remaining 1% could be killed too. Again, I'd be looking for a link about this before commenting further.
If a surgeon can surgically remove 99% but not the remaining 1% which has metastasized then that's when the cancer can return with a vengence and be hard to treat because the return will be impossible for the surgeon to get at, being spread throughout the body.
That is why recurrent metastatic cancer is so troublesome, and a failed drug treatment regimen is generally not used again.
Well if a drug has caused a remission in metastatic cancer in the body and the drugs are stopped from being taken, then a recurrence may happen, but that's not because the drug was no use, but because it was not being used any more.
Certainly if a drug treatment has always failed then it will not be used again.
I'd be looking for that link and reference to follow up about what you seem to be saying there Clifford. Not saying you are wrong; I just need to read this described in the literature and see if it accords with your point of view.
"Training the immune system" though, is currently being researched.
That's the best solution if it can be obtained but it is so hard to achieve when cancer cells look like human cells of the same type to the immune system. So for example, a lung cancer cell will tend to look much like a normal lung cell to the immune system - typically, there wouldn't be much or anything different on the outside of the cancer cell for the immune system to learn to distinguish cancer cell from normal cell of the same type. There could be external differences between cancer and normal cell but sometimes the differences are only internal to the cancer cell. So immune therapy is an option but I would not assume that the immune approach is always going to work.
That's why my approach doesn't depend on an immune reaction happening to secure a cure. If an immune reaction happens then that's good luck but even with bad luck as far as the immune system is concerned my approach can still cure a lot of cancer types indeed.
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Just for a start re the bugs in the gut that "... make some vitamins the body needs. "
Well I appreciate that you are a chemist but it is clear that you can't be a biochemist because even bored biochemists know that some vitamins are made by micro-organisms in the gut.
Some vitamins means not all vitamins, just some of them.
Really it is getting hard to have a debate with you when you don't even notice or understand what simple words like "some" mean.
Wikipedia - Gut flora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora) -"Intestinal bacteria also play a role in synthesizing vitamin B and vitamin K as well as metabolising bile acids, sterols and xenobiotics."
Deary me, BC, for you not to know that or not to understand that was what I was referring to. Well, "deary me" about sums it up.
Nope, or we wouldn't need those vitamins in our diets. Not especially important,but it shows the quality of your understanding.
The gut flora make vitamins B and K from what we eat in our diet. Yes we need to eat the precursors of the vitamins but the bacteria are also needed to convert the digested foodstuff into those particular vitamins.
Deary, deary, deary me.
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So, if the gut bacteria make, for example, vitamin B (a rather poor example since it has been shown to be a whole lot of different materials), how come people get vitamin B deficiencies?
Incidentally, one vitamin that's made by the bucketfull in the gut is vitamin B12.
Unfortunately, they stuff is made too far down the digestive tract to be absorbed os, while it's possible to extract vitamin B12 from sewage sludge (and they did) you don't actually benefit from it yourself.
The point remains, if they were good at it those substances wouldn't be vitamins.
Incidentally, re.
" Yes we need to eat the precursors of the vitamins but the bacteria are also needed to convert the digested foodstuff into those particular vitamins."
Are you labouring under the misunderstanding that vitamin C is produced by gut bacteria or do you understand that you actually need to consume it? What about vitamin E?
B6?
D?
Who cares?
More magic here
"Nope it follows that if normal, non-cancerous cells have all been stopped from dividing by the type H drugs which haven't stopped the cancer cells from dividing then the only cells which are still dividing are the cancerous cells. That's what type H drugs are supposed to do."
As I have pointed out, if you could get that level of specificity you would have already solved the problem, but you can't.
Saying "firstly I would use magic then secondly I would use more magic" doesn't help.
"Now if the type H drugs succeed, then if the type K drugs kill all dividing cells then they are killing only all the cancerous cells, because the cancer cells are the only cells which are still dividing at that point.
"
i.e. the patient is dead, but the cancer is still growing.
Why not make a "reverse" type H?
A drug that stops cancer cells dividing, but leaves healthy cells alone.
Then you could remove most of the tumour by surgery (or radiation) and leave only small but non-growing metastases which wouldn't be life threatening because their cells couldn't divide.
Do you see how, since that's what they have been trying to do for years without success, they wouldn't be able to make your "type H" drugs either? So what you do next is irrelevant.
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Also, re the quality of your debate "The fact is that the Nobel prizes are awarded at a ceremony with the Swedish King having a prominent role."
But what you said was
"I am a republican and only wish to receive prizes, awards or recognition while living or posthumously from republics or at least from non “royal” institutions which find themselves in the unfortunate circumstance of operating as I do inside a country currently governed as a kingdom."
and that describes the Nobel institute quite well.
It isn't royal and it can hardly expect to oust the monarchy, not leave the country.
I don't invite the Queen to my events and if the Nobel committee felt itself "unfortunate" to be in a kingdom then they could refuse an invite to the Swedish king and royals to take part in Nobel prize-giving ceremonies.
Rather the converse is true, the kingdom controls the appointment of the Nobel committee and ensures that only those who consider themselves fortunate to be inside Sweden governed as a kingdom, those who could be counted on to loyally invite the King to the ceremony are ever appointed.
If the Nobel committee was republican yes it could be expected to refuse to invite the Swedish king to their events. It doesn't refuse. It invites the royals. It is a royalist institution.
Would you like to set up a poll on whether or not that makes you look silly?
No. Republicans don't heed the views of royalists who think republicanism is silly.
In any event, I don't see the issue troubling you any time soon.
Well if so, can we drop discussion of the politics and stick to the science from now on?
"Admitting that the oxygen saturation varies in parts of the body doesn't admit that any healthy parts of the body are hypoxic to the degree that they are vulnerable to infection by the bio-agent.
"
Nope, but the fact that people get infected by anaerobic bacteria does show that "parts of the body are hypoxic to the degree that they are vulnerable to infection by the bio-agent"
Yes but for the most part those are trivial infections. Rarely does an anaerobic infection become a danger and that's usually because a large part of the body has been injured and no longer has blood circulating oxygen where it is needed.
It might have been better if you had looked at the wiki page I posted, discovered that obligate anaerobes are quite capable of damaging human muscle tissue etc, and gave up.
But, because you are so damned sure you are right, you ignored reality.
Well obligate anaerobes are not capable of directly harming healthy tissue, not unless they can make a lot of toxin from already injured and hypoxic tissue. Typically small infections happen but they don't amount to much.
Well, that's not going to cut it on a science website.
Depends on the website. Some websites know good science when they read it, others don't.
BTW, re "But as can be read in that article, it is quite different in unhealthy damaged parts of the body, when the blood supply is interrupted and body cells are not getting the oxygen they need to fight off infections."
the completely obvious point that you have missed is that the infection spreads to healthy tissue.
Only from an infected part which the anaerobe can use quickly to turn into lethal toxin in sufficient quantities. If the toxin is weak, if the quantity is low, the healthy tissues simply drain away the dilute toxin as they do other cellular by-products.
"The bio-agent could only infect damaged parts of the body which already had necrotic tissue in which the bio-agent could proliferate - but could not infect healthy tissue."
Because of magic?
That's just an assertion. Do you not realise you need evidence (and, before you start potentially poisoning people, pretty good evidence at that).
Because of 2 factors -
- the selection of the bio-agent so that it is not the most dangerous when it comes to infecting healthy tissue, and
- the medical use of the anti-bio-agent drug, an antibiotic, to moderate the infection so that insufficient quantities of any toxin produced can be produced to risk harm to healthy tissues which are downstream from the infected tumour
Similarly
"The infection should be medically moderated by the use of the anti-bio-agent antibiotic drug so that the bio-agent doesn't suddenly make enough toxin in large tumours which could seep in high concentrations into neighbouring healthy tissue killing it. "
requires a magic "anti-bio-agent antibiotic drug"
There's nothing magic about antibiotics, commonly in medical use to fight just such infections.
If you can make that magic drug which can distinguish between "bacterium in tumour = good" and "bacterium not in tumour=bad" then why not just use that selectivity directly on the tumour?
The anti-bio-agent drug (antibiotic) has no need to make that distinction. It moderates all living bio-agent, living in hypoxic parts of the body, whether or not those parts are part of a tumour.
The antibiotic does not operate by moderating living bacteria living inside healthy tissue because there are no such living bacteria in healthy tissue because of the oxygen there, only inactive forms such as spores.
Why add the complication of a bacterium?
I'll admit that moderating a living organism in vivo is indeed complex to do. If there were good Hypoxia-activated prodrugs (HAPs) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia-activated_prodrugs) available that could do the job they would be a lot simpler to use. Sadly however, HAPs are some way off from proving their potency against hypoxic tumour cores.
I'm hopeful we can make life simpler for the oncologists in future when HAPs finally prove their worth.
Do you really not see why your approach is bizarre?
My approach is not bizarre. All the component treatments I am bringing together in a unique way for a synergistic better cure have been tried before as individual component treatments, either experimentally or in common medical practice.
It's a new approach. It may seem bizarre to you because things new do seem bizarre to you, I don't know?
"Yes those drugs are now used in the treatment of cancer but not in the way I propose."
that would be because the way you propose would kill the patient.
No. Not if it is done right.
"My way gets around that problem by using type H drugs to stop normal cells dividing so that they are not targeted by type K drugs."
Again, if you could magically get that selectivity you should use it directly to kill the cancer cells.
Selectivity is not magic but a function of growth factor inhibitors being specific to one type of cell and cancer cells being somewhat less sensitive to growth factor signalling.
The selectivity can be used to kill cancer cells in the way I have described.
You are relying on magic to do something the hard way, if the magic worked, why not use it the easy way.
It's not easy to do something in an unspecified way. I am specifying, you are not.
You have got this
"Oh those drugs only stop cells dividing by killing them" the wrong way round.
We know how they kill cells. They do it by interfering with cell division.
That's how we know that interfering with cell division as you propose, would kill the patient.
Sadly, we know that because it has happened.
Traditional chemotherapy kills all dividing cells including normal cells which are dividing.
Killing a dividing cell is different from not killing a cell that a drug has inhibited from dividing.
It's like the difference between a soldier going into battle and getting killed in action is different from a soldier not going into battle and not getting killed.
"My approach is truly newsworthy because it provides a lot more useful details explaining a method of how to cure cancer in future than your claimed "essence" does."
My word, you are full of yourself.
Anyway, since your proposal would kill the patient I don't see it getting adopted any time soon.
The bio-agent approach has been proven not to kill. All the drugs I propose to use have been proven not to kill.
So when I use all 4 safe ingredients in such a way as to make them safer, it makes them less lethal not more - in the right hands.
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It's getting late and I have a cold so I'm not going to critique all of that in detail
"Well if so, can we drop discussion of the politics and stick to the science from now on?"
Until you chose to re-introduce it, we had.
I said "BTW, next time, try not introducing irrelevant politics into things."
"Well obligate anaerobes are not capable of directly harming healthy tissue,"
Bollocks
Has anyone here heard of tetanus?
Gas gangrene?
A whole wiki page of anaerobic infections?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_infection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_infection)
"not unless they can make a lot of toxin from already injured and hypoxic tissue."
and
"Only from an infected part which the anaerobe can use quickly to turn into lethal toxin in sufficient quantities. If the toxin is weak, if the quantity is low, the healthy tissues simply drain away the dilute toxin as they do other cellular by-products."
Would it be rude to remind you that your plan involves getting them to do exactly that?- You want them to kill the tumour.
That rather precludes the ideas that "the toxin is weak" or " the quantity is low" and requires that "they can make a lot of toxin from already injured and hypoxic tissue."
"My approach is not bizarre."
Yes it is, and for the reason I already gave.
You plan to get something to magically distinguish between "bacteria in cancer = good" and "bacteria elsewhere = bad"
Well, if you could manage that degree of specificity, it would be simpler to use it to direct toxicity to the tumour, rather than using this mythical bacterium as a proxy.
Calling it Bizarre was a euphemism- it's stupid.
" It moderates all living bio-agent, living in hypoxic parts of the body, whether or not those parts are part of a tumour."
If it kills all the bugs then they don't eat the tumour.
"Selectivity is not magic but a function of growth factor inhibitors being specific to one type of cell and cancer cells being somewhat less sensitive to growth factor signalling."
Fine, if you can do that then you can turn the idea on its head and just inhibit the cancer cells.
That's actually vastly easier because you only have to target one sort of cell rather than however many types there are in the body. I already pointed that out.
Like I said that's "bizarre" i.e. stupid.
"Traditional chemotherapy kills all dividing cells including normal cells which are dividing."
Nope plainly not true or people wouldn't survive it.
They use materials that deliberately target cells. Things like estramustine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estramustine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estramustine)
which is very old hat but has a clear mechanism- the steroid part steers the molecule to the relevant receptors as expressed by the cancer and the mustine part kills it.
But above all
" All the drugs I propose to use have been proven not to kill."
Liar.
The don't exist do they?
So you can't make that claim, and you know it.
That is a false claim: it's a lie.
IS that clear?- unless you can tell me what those drugs are then your claim is clearly false.
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My approach offers a better cure by using various drugs and methods in a synergistic way, each making up for the short-fall of the other.
I'd like to review the drawbacks of existing anti-cancer methods and drugs in a simple way and identify how my approach gets around that drawback
Bacterial treatments
Drawback when used in isolation - bacterial treatments cannot be relied upon to kill oxygenated, active cancer cells
Solution in my approach - the phase 2 treatment kills those oxygenated active cancer cells
Traditional chemotherapy using cytotoxic antineoplastic drugs
Drawback when used in isolation - chemo doesn't kill hypoxic tumour cores meaning that the cancer can come back later & they have serious side-effects and a long recovery period
Solution in my approach - phase 1 kills hypoxic tumour cores so the cancer cannot come back & the side-effects of these drugs used as type K drugs are diminished and the recovery period shorter thanks to the type H drugs
Growth factor inhibitors
Drawback when used in isolation - they only work on some cancers and even then, they don't kill the cancer cells so the patient has to live life on that medication to stop the cancer growing
Solution in my approach - used as type H drugs, they can protect a tissue or cell type from being killed by chemotherapy, the more type H drugs we can source, the more tissue or cell types can be protected and the patient only needs to take them during the chemo session never after.
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OK, you have convinced me it must be true if you tell lies but use Really big letters
No, not really- just kidding.
Fundamentally you have offered nothing but "magic" to discriminate between healthy cells and cancer cells.
You continue to ignore the massive problem with the bugs of yours- there's no reason for them to stop when they have eaten the tumour.
Your original idea was based on the belief that cancer cells would be short of oxygen and so they would be uniquely susceptible to attack by anaerobes.
There are two problems with that
Not all cancers are anaerobic- the word cancer derives from the blood supply they arrange. There are real (as opposed to magic) cancer treatments that work by blocking the production of the new blood vessels that feed the cancer
Plenty of human cells are anaerobic enough to be affected by anaerobic bacteria- there's a whole wiki page of them.
So, the only means you offered to distinguish good from bad is oxygen level and, unfortunately, that doesn't work.
Never mind.
Have a look at this.
You might find it amusing as I did.
http://eveningharold.com/2013/10/23/police-quiz-immigrant-family-on-parentage-of-confused-ginger-man/ (http://eveningharold.com/2013/10/23/police-quiz-immigrant-family-on-parentage-of-confused-ginger-man/)
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So, if the gut bacteria make, for example, vitamin B (a rather poor example since it has been shown to be a whole lot of different materials), how come people get vitamin B deficiencies?
I said "some" vitamins are made in the gut. People can get a deficiency of some vitamins, some not all, if they are on antibiotics which wipe out their gut flora.
Incidentally, one vitamin that's made by the bucketfull in the gut is vitamin B12.
Unfortunately, they stuff is made too far down the digestive tract to be absorbed os, while it's possible to extract vitamin B12 from sewage sludge (and they did) you don't actually benefit from it yourself.
The point remains, if they were good at it those substances wouldn't be vitamins.
What bacteria do for us in the gut, they are good at.
Incidentally, re.
" Yes we need to eat the precursors of the vitamins but the bacteria are also needed to convert the digested foodstuff into those particular vitamins."
Are you labouring under the misunderstanding that vitamin C is produced by gut bacteria or do you understand that you actually need to consume it?
Fruit.
What about vitamin E?
Seeds and nuts and oils derived from such.
B6?
Many foods.
D?
D is in fish oils and can be made by the action of sunlight on cholesterol in the skin.
Who cares?
I care that you are going off topic into a vitamin Q & A and not sticking to the main topic. I suppose it is more "on topic" than politics but nevertheless not as "on topic" as I would like.
My point remains that anaerobic bacteria in the gut, even though it's an hypoxic environment, are not a danger but play a useful role. They don't damage the body because the gut wall is robust enough to hold back a greater number of "individual" bacteria in the gut than there are cells in the body.
So a few more bacteria knocking about in odd nooks and crannies of the body, got there because they have been administered as a bio-agent in cancer treatment are not a cause for alarm per se, not "magically" safe but bio-engineered and selected as fit for purpose.
More magic here
"Nope it follows that if normal, non-cancerous cells have all been stopped from dividing by the type H drugs which haven't stopped the cancer cells from dividing then the only cells which are still dividing are the cancerous cells. That's what type H drugs are supposed to do."
As I have pointed out, if you could get that level of specificity you would have already solved the problem, but you can't.
The solution to the problem was found a decade and more ago by research scientists. I have recently found this excellent source.
"Exploiting Cancer Cell Cycling for Selective Protection of Normal Cells (http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/61/11/4301.full)"
Mikhail V. Blagosklonny1, and Arthur B. Pardee
Cancer Res June 1, 2001 61; 4301
ABSTRACT
Chemotherapy of cancer is limited by its toxicity to normal cells. On the basis of discoveries in signal transduction and cell cycle regulation, novel mechanism-based therapeutics are being developed. Although these cell cycle modulators were designed to target cancer cells, some of them can also be applied for a different purpose, i.e., to protect normal cells against the lethality of chemotherapy. Loss of sensitivity of cancer cells to cell cycle inhibitors can be exploited for selective protection of normal cells that retain this response. Indeed, inhibition of redundant or overactivated pathways (e.g., growth factor-activated pathways) or stimulation of absent pathways in cancer cells (e.g., p53, Rb, and p16) may not arrest cycling of cancer cells. But growth arrest of normal cells will then permit selective killing of cancer cells by cycle-dependent chemotherapy.
Now that's science!
Saying "firstly I would use magic then secondly I would use more magic" doesn't help.
"Now if the type H drugs succeed, then if the type K drugs kill all dividing cells then they are killing only all the cancerous cells, because the cancer cells are the only cells which are still dividing at that point."
i.e. the patient is dead, but the cancer is still growing.
The patient doesn't die!
The effects of the type H drugs are required to be reversible and only have effect while the drug remains in the body. When the drug clears the body, after the chemo session, the normal cell division resumes.
Why not make a "reverse" type H?
A drug that stops cancer cells dividing, but leaves healthy cells alone.
Because there's no known mechanism that can do that in general.
You can sometimes inhibit cancer cells from growing, as per in some anti-estrogen treatments for breast cancer that involve taking those inhibitors for life - but that also inhibits normal breast cells from growing for life.
So, you know, that's not too bad because older women especially don't need their breasts to grow.
But other cancers in other tissues, do need normal cells to divide to keep their vital function going - skin, gut, immune, blood, sperm production, etc.
So for those tissues, if you inhibit the cancer growth with a life time of inhibition drugs you'd also cause too much damage for the normal tissue to still function.
Then you could remove most of the tumour by surgery (or radiation) and leave only small but non-growing metastases which wouldn't be life threatening because their cells couldn't divide.
OK for tissues like breast tissue that you don't need, that's an option.
What I am proposing is a general solution when that option is not available and it may be a better solution even if that option is available.
Do you see how, since that's what they have been trying to do for years without success, they wouldn't be able to make your "type H" drugs either? So what you do next is irrelevant.
They have so been making growth factor inhibitor drugs for some tissue types for years and some of those drugs would do well as type H drugs I think but we will need more drugs to operate on other tissue types to get a complete set of type H drugs.
So what decision makers need to do is to understand how those type of drugs could be used to cure cancer and get ahead and make them.
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Some gold is present in the gut along with vitamins made by bacteria.
And if the amounts of them were significant we wouldn't need vitamins in our food and we would all be rich.
On the other hand, thanks for pointing out that vitamin C, for example is obtained from fruit (and veg BTW) and that Vitamin E is obtained from seeds, oils and such.
I knew that already- you are the one who was pretending we got them from gut bacteria.
"What bacteria do for us in the gut, they are good at."
Possibly, but if they made vitamin C for us, and they were good at it, we wouldn't get scurvy for example. It's not caused by a shortage of bacteria in the gut is it?
You are arguing against yourself there.
"I care that you are going off topic into a vitamin Q & A and not sticking to the main topic. I suppose it is more "on topic" than politics but nevertheless not as "on topic" as I would like."
If you don't want them in the thread, why did you introduce them?
Again, you seem to be picking a fight with yourself here.
"My point remains that anaerobic bacteria in the gut, even though it's an hypoxic environment, are not a danger but play a useful role. They don't damage the body because the gut wall is robust enough "
and the reason for that is that it is euplastic- it grows like fury the whole time.
"So a few more bacteria knocking about in odd nooks and crannies of the body, got there because they have been administered as a bio-agent in cancer treatment are not a cause for alarm per se, not "magically" safe but bio-engineered and selected as fit for purpose."
Do you understand that bacteria which are pretty much harmless in their normal environment are a major threat when they are somewhere else in the body?
And, unless you can get round that by some clear means the idea that they are "bio engineered and selected" is magic.
"The solution to the problem was found a decade and more ago by research scientists. I have recently found this excellent source."
then why were you seeking a Nobel prize for it?
"The patient doesn't die!
The effects of the type H drugs are required to be reversible and only have effect while the drug remains in the body."
Allow me to remind you of something you said earlier
"... bacteria in the gut, ... are not a danger .... They don't damage the body because the gut wall is robust enough"
Now, as I pointed out, they are only "robust" because they are continuously growing.
And what you have proposed to do is stop that growth.
That's the point at which the patient dies of massive infection/ toxaemia.
Again, you are arguing against yourself
I asked "Why not make a "reverse" type H? A drug that stops cancer cells dividing, but leaves healthy cells alone."
And your reply was
"Because there's no known mechanism that can do that in general."
Well, you are right. There's no known way to do the easy thing (selectively suppress the cancer)
So there's also no known way to do the difficult thing (selectively supress the healthy cells (all the varieties of them at once- reversibly) yet leave the cancer cells growing).
That's why your idea is bizarre.
You accept that it's impossible to do something easy but you say we can do something much more difficult instead.
"What I am proposing is a general solution when that option is not available and it may be a better solution even if that option is available."
No you are not.
You are saying that we should do something that is a lot harder to do than whaty ou say we are unable to do.
"They have so been making growth factor inhibitor drugs for some tissue types for years and some of those drugs would do well as type H drugs I think but we will need more drugs to operate on other tissue types to get a complete set of type H drugs."
We don't need a complete set of "every known type of cell -including genetci and racial variation) inhibitors"
We need some cancer cell inhibitors.
"So what decision makers need to do is to understand how those type of drugs could be used to cure cancer and get ahead and make them."
No, that's a whole bunch of silly.
For a start decision makers don't make drugs
More importantly, the decision makers are not going to allocate funds to a project that says
"Make magic stuff that works- even though it's going to kill the patient and it's more difficult than pursuing the approach we currently have- which, btw, works quite well.
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BTW, is this you?
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/meet-the-lonely-heart-from-hell-1079428