Fasting before chemotherapy makes the toxic treatments less dangerous and more effective -- a clever hack that could let doctors deliver drugs straight to cancer cells without actually targeting them.
That preliminary but intriguing finding, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes from the lab of University of Southern California gerontologist Valter Longo.
Two months ago, Longo graced these pages after using caloric restriction and gene tweaking to set a longevity record in yeast. Caloric restriction activates cell-rejuvenating genes and could explain why tumor-ridden mice starved for two days were able to handle chemotherapy doses that killed half of a control group and left the other half devastated.
Critically, while healthy cells were protected, cancer cells remained vulnerable to the treatment. Longo effectively sent drugs straight into the tumors -- a much-anticipated technique that's so far eluded cancer researchers.
Though Longo duplicated the effect in human cells, it needs to be stressed that this is a very early finding. Nonetheless, scientists are enthusiastic: if healthy cells are exempted, chemotherapy doses could be upped and side effects lowered.
"This is a very important paper. It defines a novel concept in cancer biology," said University of California, Los Angeles cancer researcher Pincas Cohen in a press release.
Cohen's comments were echoed by Felipe Sierra, director of the Biology of Aging program at the National Institute on Aging.
"This is not just one more anti-cancer treatment that attacks the cancer cells. To me, that's an important conceptual difference."
Starvation-dependent differential stress resistance protects normal but not cancer cells against high-dose chemotherapy [PNAS]
May the day soon arrive for when this terrible disease here will be a thing of the past.Cancer has left Million's in it's wake... GTO
