Very interesting. Another result showing how increased NAD+ levels 'benefit' cancer cells casting a shadow on the idea of NAD+ boosting supplementation to increase healthspan and lifespan. But then, it's not like this means that heightened NAD+ levels cause cancer. Just that it is plausible that it makes it more aggressive, once you have it.
Why cancer cells waste so much energy
31–40 of 199 posts
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#32Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#33I’m curious to see how fasting might influence cancer treatment. I know in other parts of the world it is seen as a legitimate treatment, while also potentially considered to be a hippy dippy homeopathic treatment. Anecdotally it seems you can starve certain cancers to death pretty easily by severely limiting your caloric intake. I sense a relationship between that and this study.
No medical experience, other than as a patient... however I read the body can live up to two months without food (but with adequate water). If you managed to survive longer than the cancer cells, wouldn't they just come back after defeat? Doesn't this stem from DNA?
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also has no scientific grounding whatsoever: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/12/06/the-atavi...
Well, that is why I linked to NIH rather than one scientist's blog. Myers is very outspoken in his rejection of the idea, but even as an amateur I can see rhetoric sleights of hand in his argumentation. An example: These “layers” don’t exist! When my car malfunctions, I don’t get a horse Bad comparison, a car did not evolve from a horse, there is no mechanism for it to have a previous "horse layer". Myers seems to ha…
When the escalator malfunctions, you get a staircase
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#35Obligatory: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cells_2x.png
(not because of article which describes mechanism, but because of people who will jump to conclusion)
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also has no scientific grounding whatsoever: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/12/06/the-atavi...
Well, that is why I linked to NIH rather than one scientist's blog. Myers is very outspoken in his rejection of the idea, but even as an amateur I can see rhetoric sleights of hand in his argumentation. An example: These “layers” don’t exist! When my car malfunctions, I don’t get a horse Bad comparison, a car did not evolve from a horse, there is no mechanism for it to have a previous "horse layer". Myers seems to ha…
Well I wouldn't say the multicellular system is reverting to a single older cell phase per say. Rather it needs NAD+ so it optimizes for that. The cells also lose adhesion and then migrate so clearly there's some "programming exception" not being caught. I view the cell as a bunch of copy paste code that's had some degree of refactoring applied so there are different programs and control systems in operation at any given time. Sometimes these get activated or not repressed erroneously, sometimes the source code gets scrambled.
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#37The research around NAD+ production and cancer proliferation may also give some causal explanation--or at least, a place to start looking--for the correlation between B vitamin supplementation (edit: folic acid, specifically) and increased cancer rates/fatalities in certain high-risk populations: https://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20091117/folic-acid-b12-ma...
Not B vitamins, but folic acid (just one of them).
Folic acid is required for stable DNA, something that cancer doesn't need at all (it needs mutations for plasticity).
Its also needed for DNA production, but many more cells need it, those that have short lifespan - cells lining the stomach for example, sperm cells, some immune cells etc.
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#38I’m curious to see how fasting might influence cancer treatment. I know in other parts of the world it is seen as a legitimate treatment, while also potentially considered to be a hippy dippy homeopathic treatment. Anecdotally it seems you can starve certain cancers to death pretty easily by severely limiting your caloric intake. I sense a relationship between that and this study.
When I look at this image [0] it seems to me that muslim countries (which tend to fast once a year, I guess?) and poor countries have fewer cases of cancer.
But at least with the poor countries I'm not sure if it's because people die of other reasons before they even could get cancer.
[0] https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-a0728f7c2418f32922558b...
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#39So the cancer cells went with the non-blocking, albeit slower algorithm. With aerobic, pipelines could get filled with ATP and end up blocking the essential NAD+. So the optimization was a loosely decoupled slower fermentation process over the faster aerobic process. Back pressure avoided and all that. So tempting to go with analogies we are familiar with.
There is a relatively new theory saying that malignant, metastatic cancer cells behave like single cell organisms, and that cancer basically represents an unwanted return to our genetic roots; multicellular organisms used to be single cell organisms a billion years ago and the original genes might carry on within our DNA until today. But they should be switched off. Once they are switched on, the cells will stop coop…
> There is a relatively new theory saying that malignant, metastatic cancer cells behave like single cell organisms, and that cancer basically represents an unwanted return to our genetic roots
It's not close to even 'relatively' being new. I was giving cancer talks that made mention of it back when I worked in cancer bio, just about 16 years ago now. I didn't come up with it, and it wasn't new then. I used it in talks to laymen, to give a very abstract idea of how cancer worked. But it fell into the category of "lies we tell children," because it was only true in the most abstract way, and utterly incorrect once you dug into any details.
The reason cancer bio people dislike it is because it's only true at the 10,000-foot, highly abstracted level. When you start digging into the granular level, its testable predictions rank between 'falsified' and 'irrelevant'. It doesn't produce any alternative lines for thinking about treatment, causality, etc. Especially given that the progress of a single cancer tends to be all about their interaction with the multicellular milieu - e.g., developing immune evasion, which isn't at all an "atavistic" trait, although it's one of the core hextad that defines malignant development. (On the contrary, it comes built-in for normal cells - they're now developing a novel immune evasion, to hide their newly altered antigens from the immune system).
e.g., "Cannot help but switch to previous single-celled metabolism" doesn't follow in any meaningful way from the thesis of atavistic traits. In fact, it doesn't predict at all the relationship between tumor size, distance from vascular supply, and anaerobic metabolism. "Cells without controlled growth will outgrow their vascular supply, requiring a transition to anerobic metabolism" does, however, and predicted the relationships we see. It's not "cannot help but engage with less efficient metabolism", it's "transition to relying on the only metabolism afforded to a highly-dysregulated cell that is not responsive to environmental signals that normally trigger or withhold growth." Normal unicellular organisms are responsive to those signals.
Yeah, I don't hate it - it's a cute metaphor. It's a nice way of thinking of cancer at the 10K-foot level. It's just also wrong at any closer level of inspection than that, which is why people whose job is to be elbow-deep in all of the nitty-gritty details of cancer can't help but look at it and go "please stop wasting my time."
Re: Why cancer cells waste so much energy
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a relatively new theory saying that malignant, metastatic cancer cells behave like single cell organisms, and that cancer basically represents an unwanted return to our genetic roots; multicellular organisms used to be single cell organisms a billion years ago and the original genes might carry on within our DNA until today. But they should be switched off. Once they are switched on, the cells will stop coop…
It also has no scientific grounding whatsoever: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/12/06/the-atavi...
Yeah, there isn't really any science to back it up.
> and the original genes might carry on within our DNA until today
Luckily we don't need to resort to "might". Since the advent of genome sequencing we can just go ahead and take a look!
E.g. yeast (your standard single-celled organism) posesses ~6000 genes of which ~23% (= 1380 genes) are similar in function to those of humans. Of those genes most of them have been severely mutated, on average sharing 32% sequence similarity, which is a world of difference in terms of protein functionality.
The few highly preserved genes that remain are core parts of all eucaryotic life (ribosomes, proteins for amino acid metabolism, etc.) and are some of the most studied genes (regarding cancer and in general).
Suggesting that there are some genes hiding in there and have been overlooked due to narrow-mindedness of the whole life science community is a bit naive.