Possible new breakthrough in cancer treatments....

Today's Post:  Friday, 9-7-2012

If this research tests as safe to use with no "gotcha" side effects, it could be a VERY big deal.

There are two problems with chemo. 

It harms the rest of the patient -- not just his or her cancer cells.  With some cancers, if you use enough chemo to kill the cancer cells off well, you can wind up killing the patient or causing permanent harm to their health or brain.

And, often cancer cells that survive then restart the cancer even if lots of chemo was used.

But if you could use ten percent chemo as much that would slash the harm to the patient.  And, if the chemo was 100 times as effective so 10% had a permanent kill rate of cancer cells ten times as effective, you could solve both problems at once.

Even using half the chemo but with 5 times the effect for a chemo version 10 times as powerful would help enormously.

New research has found a way that in the initial tests not only has done this but tested as both killing the cancer and preventing its recurrence.

(I'd heard that heating the patient while they have chemo can help with this and/or that also taking immune system boosters like vitamin D3 and astragalus and agaricus blazei at the same time and after the chemo can help. The effectiveness of these in cutting the recurrence rate is apparently due to your empowered and boosted immune system killing off the cancer’s trial restarts when they are still small.  Taking these also seems to have some protective effect for the patient from any damage from the chemo.

It’s also been reported that in addition to making the patient feel more in control and its other health benefits that for people who are fighting cancer, doing regular exercise can reduce recurrence.

But each of those work sometimes in some people much better than others and sometimes not very well in other people.)

If this new research works in other cancers as well as it did in the cancers they tried it on and turns out to have no serious or permanent side effects, separately adding that big a jump in effectiveness in the chemo itself too would be a HUGE advantage!

Medical News today had a study in a story dated, Tues, Sept 4, 2012 in an email earlier this week

It seems that researchers at the University of Missouri tested a way to make chemo more effective and reported it to be 10 times more effective than currently used chemotherapy in tests to kill breast cancer, lung cancer, and colon cancer tumors.

Their study was published in the American Chemical Society Journal of Medicinal Chemistry,

They added a kind of chemical structure using Carboranes which are clusters containing the elements boron, carbon and hydrogen.   They found adding the carboranes to the chemo did help the drug to bind more tightly to cancer cells and did more effectively destroy the cancer cells they tested it on.

Mark W. Lee Jr., assistant professor of chemistry in College of Arts and Science and his colleagues used carboranes to build new drugs that aimed to shut off a cancer cell's energy production which reliably kills the cells and prevents them from replicating apparently.

By increasing the binding strength of the drug with the carboranes, they also found that a smaller dose worked which both minimized likely side effects and while still increasing the effectiveness of the drug in killing cancer cells. With the carboranes, Lee found the drug to be able to bind 10 times more powerfully to the cancer cells.

Lee also said this: 

"Too often, after radiation or chemotherapy, cancer cells repair themselves and reinvade the body." & "This drug not only selectively shuts off the energy production for the cancer cells, but it also inhibits the processes that allow those cancer cells to repair themselves.

When we tested our carborane-based drugs, we found that they were unimaginably potent. So far, we have tested this on breast, lung and colon cancer, all with exceptional results."

He added that new drugs based on the technique his lab has pioneered could be “many thousands of times more potent than the drugs that are used in the clinics today."

Wow!

My only worry is that adding this kind of superglue to the chemo might wind up having the drug stick to cells that are not cancerous with bad effects.

This might mean that also adding the methods of using a patient’s immune system to only deliver the drug to the cancer cells might be needed.

Or it may be that the drug is so effective and the amount is so small where it kills 100 % of the cancer cells even if it kills healthy cells but it may only kill one out of 500 healthy cells or less, that the actual side effects turn out to not be that bad.

If that second possibility is the case or they already have a way to mostly or only deliver the drug to the cancer cells or they can use immune system targeting to deliver the chemo to cancer cells, this could be a truly huge breakthrough.

Since it looks as if it might well be that good, I hope some of millions of dollars targeted for cancer research can be used to cut the time needed to test this method and get it into wide use by ten or twenty times less than what has been standard procedure if it tests out as well as it sounds like it might.

Meanwhile, what else can you do to prevent cancer until then?

Check and consider using the methods listed in my post, “Ways to prevent, slow, or stop prostate cancer....”which appeared on Friday, 7-13-2012.

This lists many effective ways to prevent all cancers.  In addition, many of the methods to prevent prostate cancer and to prevent aggressive prostate cancer are effective against all cancers.

Many of these methods also work to help prevent cancer recurrence too.

Whether, in you, these methods cut your risk of cancer by 70% or 99.97 %, these methods are effective enough, they are each worth trying!