Cancer starts in the mitochondria, & fixing them might treat it - a groundbreaking study shows it more clearly than ever.
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The metabolic origins of cancer have been known for about a century.
Nobel prize winner Otto Warburg noted that cancer cells had inefficient metabolism - they turned glucose into lactic acid preferentially, instead of into CO2.
Why this helps cancer grow has been revealed more recently.
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When mitochondria are not working properly, it is a breeding ground for cancer.
ā More reactive oxygen species produced
ā Greater acidification
ā More oncometabolites
ā Aberrant epigenetic signaling
ā Worsened immune function
ā Impaired cell death
ā Improper cycle regulation
+ more.
This recent study showed that restoring mitochondrial health is a viable treatment for cancer.
They did this by transplanting mitochondria from healthy cells into cancer cells.
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When lung cancer cells received the healthy mitochondria, they became more sensitized to chemotherapy.
A higher concentration of healthy mitochondria cut the amount of chemo (cisplatin) needed to kill the cancer cells by around half.
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Healthy mitochondria also shrank tumor growth in animals.
Greatly enhanced the effectiveness of the chemo.
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Reversing the mitochondrial dysfunction in cancer cells also reversed the other hallmarks of cancer.
For instance, healthy mitochondria reduced HIF1α, a key mediator of cancer invasion.
It also reduced the "stemness" or the ability of cancer cells to turn into cancer stem cells.
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With healthy mitochondria, cancer cells are able to kill themselves properly.
They could produce more ROS and were able to induce programmed cell death (TUNEL), processes that are impaired in cancer and lead to the cells' accumulation.
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Another key component to solving cancer is proper immune functioning, since it is the immune system that actually clears out tumors.
While chemo (cisplatin) worsened anti-tumor immunity, the healthy mitochondria increased:
ā CD4+ area - a marker of T helper cells
ā CD8+ area - for cytotoxic T cells
ā NKp46 - a marker for natural killer cells
all critical factors in immune cell clearance of cancer cells.
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Cancer is a metabolic / mitochondrial disease in nature.
I've written here about all of the angles one would take to optimize mitochondrial function:
N-acetylcysteine (NAC) was shown to reverse brain damage from aluminum in a critical study.
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Animals were put into 6 groups - either getting aluminum or NAC or both.
The aluminum was administered as aluminum chloride, and it was done so orally.
This is important because roughly only 0.5% of oral aluminum chloride is absorbed, so the real effective doses the animals received were far less than than the 100 mg / kg.
This is still a high dose, but aluminum is known to accumulate in tissues.
Animals had severely impaired memory performance with the aluminum, but this was improved with NAC.
The morris water test trains rats to find a hidden platform in pool.
The latencies (times) is how long it takes to find it on a given day.
Less time = better memory.
As you can see, the high dose NAC almost completely reversed the memory impairment from aluminum.