Title : The common cure for all cancers- clue from cancer stem cells
Abstract:
For this talk I review seven different types of cancers: leukemia, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, and ovarian cancer, their experimental and clinical studies, to come up with a model of the genesis of cancer common to all types of cancers in which Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) play the vital role. CSCs form by multiple genetic/epigenetic mutations occurring in multiple stages, spread over many years, in the otherwise healthy Adult Stem Cell (ASC), or ASC’s Multi-Potent Progenitors (MPPs), or Mature Differentiated Cells (MDCs) in some cases like, for eg., in liver. As a result of these multiple mutations the CSCs begin to both proliferate and undergo apoptosis aggressively. It is the large scale of apoptosis of highly mutated stem cell that fools the homeostasis of organism, and henceforth the homeostasis is unable to detect that these highly mutated stem cells are defective and cannot take any corrective action against these highly mutated stem cells (the highly mutated stem cells by themselves have a sense that they are defective and hence program their own death which is called apoptosis, but the otherwise healthy cells and immune cells surrounding the highly defective mutated stem cells do not have a sense that these stem cells are defective- this is meant by the phrase fooling of homeostasis) . This is the genesis of cancer (i.e. fooling of homeostasis by pre-cancerous stem cells) common to all cancers. Because the highly mutated stem cells are undergoing apoptosis in large numbers the repair mechanism of these cells are triggered to take corrective action by up-regulating the particular glucose metabolism pathway known as pentose phosphate pathway (G6PD, an important enzyme in this glucose metabolism pathway is known to be over-expressed even in those cancer cells which were initially deficient in G6PD gene), and these cells thereby evolve into strong cells which do not further undergo apoptosis. Or the cells which survive apoptosis evolve into stronger cells by up-regulating this glucose metabolism pathway. Now we have only a bunch of highly proliferating mutated stem cells and cancer sets in. This hypothesis which I popularly call Fooling of Homeostasis Hypothesis (FHH) suggests two chemicals ethanol-alcohol dehydrogenase and sodium metabisulphite as the common cure for all cancers if directed only against the cancer cells. Both these chemicals are known depressants of pentose phosphate pathway.
