Dr. Weeks’ Comment: There are two types of cancer cells – the cancer TUMOR cell (not so dangerous, albeit the target of your oncologist) and the lethal cancer STEM cell (this cell is made “more numerous and more virulent” by standard of care – chemotherapy and radiation). Where do cancer STEM cells come from? The attached description of an article published today in CELL answers this question. Simple answer: from regular, healthy, stem cells which are, like undergraduates in college who have not yet committed to a major, able to become any tissue:heart tissue, gut tissue, skin tissues – you name it. “Totipotent” means all powerful and these “undergraduates” are an integral part of our intrinsic repair system because they migrate to and become (thereby repairing) any injured tissue….. even (and here’s the rub) cancerous tissue!! That’s right: injured cancerous TUMOR tissue (from targeted i.e. successful chemo and radiation) recruits uncommitted stem cells to come and repair the cancer TUMOR thereby transforming helpful STEM cells into lethal cancer STEM. Here is how it works: injured tissue sends out a chemical SOS message (an inflammatory cytosine IL-6) which broadcasts, “I am injured tissue. Are there any helpful stem cells out there which can come rescue me?” When the uncommitted stem cells arrive at the injured tumor, they transform (being totipotent) into cancer STEM cells and you are in a worse situation now compared to before the standard of care.
Prof. Max Wicha, M.D. Founding Director U Michigan’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and distinguished Professor of Oncology and Internal Medicine declared “Chemotherapy and Radiation make your cancer worse“ . Here is why: “The reason current therapies don’t always work, according to Max Wicha, is because they don’t kill the most important cells in the tumor. Scientists recently discovered that most types of cancer are driven by specialized cells called cancer stem cells. Wicha wants to develop new therapies that can target and eliminate these cells.”
Other oncologists are listening, but so far the standard of care has not changed despite this earthquake of an article published in NATURE December 2014 which pointed out that the “wound response” (the inflammatory cytokine broadcast from the injured cancer tumor after chime and radiation) was responsible to creating cancer STEM cells.
Corrective Cancer Care successfully prevents this malignant transformation but it is not the standard of care and conventional oncologists would lose their medical licenses if they offered anything other than the standard of care so you’ll need to see someone who is not an oncologists or see an oncologist like Prof. Wicha who can enroll you in a study which aims to remedy the cancer STEM cell as opposed to killing the cancer TUMOR cell. In the meanwhile, bet your life on the most powerful finely ground whole anti-inflammatory seed drink and eat the anti-inflammatory diet.
To thoroughly understand why you and your loved one need to focus not on killing cancer TUMOR cells with chemo and radiation but to remedy the lethal cancer STEM cells, read this article and study each hyperlink.
Then when your oncologist tells you that you need to take cytotoxic chemotherapy and cytotoxic radiation therapy, just turn on your smart phone, tell the doctor you’d like to ask one question and record the answer and ask her or him one question: “Tell me doctor, if I take your advice, what will the chemo and radiation do to my cancer STEM cells?” This is the million dollar question (life or death are the states) and the answer is worth recording.
Stem cell propagation fuels cancer risk in different organs
August 25, 2016
The idea that stem cells – special cells that divide to repair and generate tissues – might be the major determinant of cancer risk has provoked great debate in the scientific community. Some researchers maintain that environmental carcinogens are more important in determining cancer risk. Now a team of researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the University of Cambridge, England, has performed a large systematic, organism-wide study that confirms the crucial contribution of stem cells to the origins of cancer in different organs of mice. The results appear online today in the journal Cell.
“The chance accrual of random mistakes in cell DNA likely plays an important role in generating cancer; but whether this has to happen in specific cell types, such as stem cells, and precisely how other factors such as environmental carcinogens contribute to cancer is unclear,” said the study’s senior author Richard Gilbertson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Center at Cambridge University, England, and former St. Jude scientific and Comprehensive Cancer Center director. “Indeed, an argument has raged across the scientific community for some years now – some say cancer is ‘bad luck’ because mutations arise by chance in stem cells, while others argue environmental carcinogens are more important. This disagreement has arisen largely from the use of different mathematical models to look at existing human cancer and stem cell data, from which it is extremely difficult to tease out the impact of individual factors. Therefore, we tested these different opinions in actual experimental models that looked at the individual components that might drive cancer.”
The researchers used a specific “marker molecule” called Prom1 to map the activity of cells in different organs throughout the life of mice. In some organs, Prom1+ cells were mature, non-dividing cells that did not repair or regenerate the organ, but in a handful of organs these cells were highly active stem cells. “By following these Prom1+ cells in all the major organs in mice through their lifetime journey we were able to identify in which organs these cells were actively dividing stem cells,” said Liqin Zhu, Ph.D., a research associate at St. Jude and the first author of the study.
Once they had an organism-wide map of the function of these cells, the researchers introduced DNA mutations into these cells similar to the changes that occur in human cancers. “This approach does away with the need for carcinogens, removing them from the cancer equation and allowing us to test if the generative capacity of stem cells influenced cancer risk,” said Zhu. After a rigorous study lasting more than seven years and comprehensive statistical modeling of the results by Dr. Arzu Onar-Thomas at St. Jude, the clear answer was that only cells with stem cell activity make cancer.
“But that’s not the whole story,” said Gilbertson. “While we have shown that stem cell function is required to generate cancer, our study also revealed that damage to tissues such as the liver, the kind that can occur in humans, can ‘wake up’ sleeping stem cells, make them divide and massively increase cancer risk. Therefore, we propose that the origin of cancer lies in a ‘perfect storm’ that includes DNA mutations, stem cell function and tissue damage,” concluded Gilbertson.
…FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE CLICK HERE