Treating the untreatable cancers

By BRYAN HUBBARD

It is a secret, oncologists rarely share with their patients: Around 25 percent of all cancers are currently considered untreatable, and the prognosis is worse for colon (colorectal) and lung cancers, with half of these immune to chemotherapy.

But the untreatable may soon be very treatable with a new therapy that blends two approaches that have always been relegated to the fringes of medicine: fasting and high-dose vitamin C, given intravenously. Both have had hit-and-miss research results when used independently but combining the two seems to have a super-boosting effect that kills these hard-to-treat cancer cells without affecting the surrounding healthy cells.

The therapy is still in its early stages.  It has been tested on lines of colorectal cancer cells in the laboratory with “remarkable effects”, says lead researcher Valter Longo at the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute. Each therapy killed some of the cancer cells on their own, “but when used together, they had a dramatic effect, killing almost all cancerous cells.”[1]

Longo and his team then tested the combined therapy on laboratory mice and saw the same positive results, and the cancer started to reverse. Excited by the results, five clinical trials on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients are now underway.

Although a variety of cancer cells were used in the experiment, the team discovered that the vitamin C/fasting combination was especially effective against cells that had a special mutation, one that makes cancer untreatable. This mutation protects the cancer cells from even the most powerful and toxic chemotherapy drugs—and when the mutation is detected, oncologists are told not to treat as it will probably destroy the patient’s quality of life for no good reason.

The mutation is called KRAS (Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog), but aside from smoking, researchers are not sure why it happens. It is a gene that is responsible for sending signals to cells to grow and divide, but when it mutates those signals can start the process of cancer.  

If a diagnosis of cancer was not bad enough, one that has the KRAS mutation is a death sentence. In one study, 63 percent of lung cancer patients who had the KRAS mutation died compared with 32 percent who did not have it.[2] In another, looking at 116 lung cancer patients, just 11 percent with the mutation had a five-year survival rate, but 64 percent of those without the mutation achieved the five-year mark.[3]

The mutation creates a protective shield around the cancerous cell. Chemotherapy drugs—such as panitumumab, cetuximab and erlotinib—have had no effect whatsoever in patients with KRAS-mutated colorectal and lung cancers.

Until Longo’s discovery, oncologists have been at a loss as to how to treat around a quarter of all cancers they see.  Fasting and vitamin C have been promising options for years, but the research has not been consistent, with a positive result soon being overtaken by a negative one, and, as a result, both have been filed in the burgeoning folder of unproven cancer therapies.

There is a good scientific basis for fasting as a cancer therapy. While the American Cancer Society advocates the cancer patient eat plenty of calories and protein, especially during chemotherapy, it is also known the diet feeds the cancer. In 1931, the German doctor Otto Warburg noticed that cancer cells were relying on sugar—rather than oxygen—for their energy, and this process is recognised as ‘the Warburg effect’.

Starve the body of sugars and the cancer cell will also die, or so the theory goes, and the process has been witnessed in laboratory tests. In one, 17 lines of cancer cells, including samples of melanoma, glioma and breast cancer, were ‘starved’, and the researchers said the results were as successful as anything achieved by chemotherapy; the cancer cells stopped growing and more significantly, those that were normally resistant to cancer drugs—possibly because of KRAS mutation—suddenly became sensitive to the drugs.  Fasting made the untreatable cancer cells treatable.[4]

A five-day fast can produce a 50 percent fall in glucose—the sugar in the blood—which is feeding the cancer and helping it grow, estimates Longo. The fast, followed by the resumption of a normal diet, could also protect the cancer patient against the worst ravages of chemotherapy without him losing any weight.[5]

But to really see a turnaround in the cancer, the patient would need to follow a strict diet, with a 40 percent reduction in protein, for months, and this is where the theory hits up against the hard wall of pragmatics. No oncologist would allow his patient to be on such a strict diet for months during chemotherapy, indeed his ethical code would prevent him from even suggesting it, and so there the fasting approach ran out of road.

A strict fast is just that: No food whatsoever other than regular sips of water, and this is extreme for even a healthy person let alone someone with cancer. Seeing the dilemma, Longo has developed his own version of the fast, the fasting mimicking diet (FMD), which he says delivers all the health benefits of a true fast without starving the patient (see sidebar: A fast of sorts).

While fasting has been on the outer fringes of cancer treatment, vitamin C has at least been courted by the mainstream. Touted by American biochemist Linus Pauling more than 40 years ago, high-dose vitamin C (ascorbic acid) therapy was found to reverse end-stage cancers. The way the vitamin was delivered did not seem to matter; patients given the vitamin orally or intravenously were improving, the researchers said.[6] 

But the therapy was quickly abandoned when two separate clinical trials, with high doses given orally, could not replicate the results. The cancer patients were getting sicker.[7] This could have been because Pauling got it wrong: it does matter how the vitamin is administered, and it has to be done intravenously. One study showed that cancer patients on a vitamin C drip, being given an average of 10g a day, were improving[8], but a later trial, following the exact same protocols, failed to see any improvement in a small group of patients with advanced cancer.[9]

But why were researchers coming up with such different results? High doses of the vitamin can trigger a biological process where a KRAS-mutated cancer cell produces ferritin, a protein that binds iron, and iron is associated with cancer growth, especially of colorectal cancer. There is a direct correlation between levels of iron and chances of survival in colon cancer cases; the higher the level, the lower the survival rate.

And this could be why Longo’s two-punch approach of fasting and vitamin C is working. Fasting reduces levels of ferritin in the body, and this allows the vitamin C into the cancer cell and kill it.

The approach could also make chemotherapy more effective, but that is a short-term gain. Longo sees the day when mild drugs without the neutron-bomb effects of chemo will be given to the cancer patient. And, possibly, the day will come when cancer is not treated with any drugs at all, but just with a short fast and vitamin C. 

Reprinted with permission from What Doctors Don’t Tell You, July/August 2020.

More information: www.wddty.com