Feeling crabby about cancer conspiracy theories

You’ve all seen it at least once, maybe on your Facebook news feed, maybe on your Tumblr dashboard. Someone posts a link to a story about a new strategy of fighting cancer, and how pharmaceutical companies are keeping it secret because they can’t make bazillions of dollars by selling it. Usually, it’s something simple, like vitamins, but maybe it’s something you’ve never heard of, like neoplastons.

The person who posted it is usually outraged, outraged, I tell you. How dare these evil companies sit on something that could save untold millions of lives!! How dare this conspiracy be allowed to continue!!

Guess what? It’s BS. Next time someone posts a story like that, send them to read Cath Ennis’ defense of cancer research at The Guardian. 

Guess what? Cancer is hard to fight. Unlike fighting an infection or something, you have to fight a piece of the human body, without killing the rest of the human body.

“… killing cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed is like trying to win an old fashioned infantry battle in which both sides are wearing the same uniform, except some of the enemy have slightly different shaped buttons, others have slightly longer bootlaces, others have slightly lacier underwear, and all have the ability to suddenly change clothes halfway through the fight.”

Especially once you realize that the people who are being accused of the conspiracy lose loved ones, and even their own lives, to cancer every year.

The only conspiracies out there are the ones that hold up false hope and bad science in order to insult hard-working people fighting the most difficult set of diseases that humans face. It should stop.

What Makes Cancer Cells Different?

We’ve talked before about how tricky a disease cancer is. Or, if you want to be accurate, how tricky a “set of diseases” it is. I mean, a single tumor is like a world unto itself, full of different populations of cells, each with their own individual set of mutations. That’s crazy to think about.

Cancer is the result of one of our cells’ most basic and core functions, cell division, gone awry. What causes it, in the large sense? How can we use cancer’s tricks against it to try and treat these diseases?

George Zaidan tackles those questions for TED-Ed in the video above. If nothing else, it’s the best combination of beans, fabric and cancer biology I’ve ever seen in a video. Goes nicely with my TED-Ed video on how the human genome is organized in the first place.

Source: youtube.com

Cognitive damage from cancer treatment isn’t ‘all in your head’ Cancer survivors who have undergone chemotherapy often report problems with memory and concentration after treatment. It’s not surprising, considering that chemotherapy drugs are some of the most potent and powerful known to medicine. Now a team has put some neuroscience behind this mysterious condition. Before now, doctors were unsure that “chemo brain” was something that actually existed, separate from depression-like symptoms and other stresses associated with the cancer experience. New brain scan studies of chemo patients (like above) show reduced (green) activity in areas of the brain associated with concentration and memory. Beating cancer is hard enough without feeling like you’re going crazy. I hope this helps us treat the mind and body of those who fight it. Check out more at Boing Boing.
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Cognitive damage from cancer treatment isn’t ‘all in your head’

Cancer survivors who have undergone chemotherapy often report problems with memory and concentration after treatment. It’s not surprising, considering that chemotherapy drugs are some of the most potent and powerful known to medicine. Now a team has put some neuroscience behind this mysterious condition.

Before now, doctors were unsure that “chemo brain” was something that actually existed, separate from depression-like symptoms and other stresses associated with the cancer experience. New brain scan studies of chemo patients (like above) show reduced (green) activity in areas of the brain associated with concentration and memory.

Beating cancer is hard enough without feeling like you’re going crazy. I hope this helps us treat the mind and body of those who fight it.

Check out more at Boing Boing.

Source: Boing Boing

Q:Do you think we will ever find a cure for cancer or are scientists better off focusing on preventative awareness?

justyoureverydayordinarylabrat

Question 4 of our Friday fun fest:

I could write a book about this, but I don’t have the time or attention span at the moment, so I’ll give you the quick version.

Mots of people people probably don’t want to hear this, but I sit in the camp that believes we will never cure cancer. I feel this way for several reasons:

  1. There is no such thing as “cancer”. Cancer is really hundreds of individual diseases each with its own individual cause, be it environment or mutation or whatever. Some are due to viral infections, some are due to mutations in cell growth signals, some are due to chromosomes falling apart and re-attaching in ways that creates never-before seen genes. And that’s just three ways it can happen! And those represent hundreds of individual changes in each category! And that’s just cancers we know the cause of!
  2. Even if we could perfectly deconstruct a single type of cancer, and design a drug to fight it, cancer is living. And therefore constantly evolving. Inside of a tumor, tens or hundreds or thousands of different sub-populations of cells can form, each with their own batch of mutations. What kills 90% may do nothing to the other 10%. When the “genomes” inside a tumor were recently sequenced, they discovered it was like a population unto itself. 
  3. Which leads me to detection. If a tumor isn’t the same on the inside, then it isn’t the same on the outside. Cancer therapies rely on early detection. But if you’re looking for Villain A, Villain B might slip through your tests. And like we just saw, tumors are full of unknown Villains B-Z.
  4. Many cancers are sporadic. It sucks, but sometimes cancer just pops up out of nowhere. New mutations, new gene combinations, new infections. We can’t predict them, so we can’t cure them.

I know this is super-downer, because everyone wants to think that cancer is curable. It isn’t. But individual cancers will one day be made curable. That’s why we should do what we can for the types we understand, and realize that this is the beginning of a long battle with the foundations of our very biological makeup. Prevention will do more than anything in reducing cancer deaths (Editorial comment: stop tanning and smoking), but continued research will lead us to a point where we can at least cure some cancers.

Don’t let that discourage you, scientists of the future. Let it motivate you!

publicradiointernational: Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka is a fan of “Glee” and likes to kayak. He’s also the mind behind a new pancreatic cancer test that is 168 times faster than anything else in the field. In May, Jack won $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his test. He is currently working on getting this test patented. More. (Photo: Jack Andraka, via sciencenewsforkids.org) Young Genius Jack should serve as a great role model for creative thinking in science and the perseverance. His pancreatic cancer test uses antibodies, basically little sticky proteins that serve as specific “detectors” for particular molecules. Our immune system uses antibodies as “sentries”, watching for foreign molecules, and alerting the body’s defenses when they stick to something that fits in their “keyhole”, so to speak. The antibody he used recognizes a specific molecule on a certain cancer cell. The antibodies are attached to carbon nanotubes, and then patient samples are washed over them. If the cancer molecule sticks to the antibody (a “positive” test), then an electric signal is detected! Cool idea, Jack. We’ll keep our eyes out for more from this smart guy.
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publicradiointernational:

Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka is a fan of “Glee” and likes to kayak. He’s also the mind behind a new pancreatic cancer test that is 168 times faster than anything else in the field. In May, Jack won $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his test.

He is currently working on getting this test patented. More.

(Photo: Jack Andraka, via sciencenewsforkids.org)

Young Genius

Jack should serve as a great role model for creative thinking in science and the perseverance.

His pancreatic cancer test uses antibodies, basically little sticky proteins that serve as specific “detectors” for particular molecules. Our immune system uses antibodies as “sentries”, watching for foreign molecules, and alerting the body’s defenses when they stick to something that fits in their “keyhole”, so to speak.

The antibody he used recognizes a specific molecule on a certain cancer cell. The antibodies are attached to carbon nanotubes, and then patient samples are washed over them. If the cancer molecule sticks to the antibody (a “positive” test), then an electric signal is detected!

Cool idea, Jack. We’ll keep our eyes out for more from this smart guy.

Cancer Stem Cells: New Proof of the “Queen Bee” Behind Tumor Cells Cancer is a tricky beast. Even if a tumor is detected early, if the drugs, radiation or surgery don’t kill every single cell that’s become cancerous, it can come back stronger than ever. One of the theories behind this is that tumors contain a subset of stem cells. Just like the stem cells that are present in embryos and the ones we use for medical technologies, cancer stem cells are thought to “feed” the rest of the tumor by dividing indefinitely. They are a constant source of new, deadly cells, and cancer therapies often miss them. A bunch of new studies are making this “cancer stem cell” theory sound a bit more certain. Several experiments recently tracked cancer cells in mice using fluorescent markers like you see above. By shrinking, attacking and seeding the tumors in different ways, they were all able to show that there is almost certainly a stem cell population in a tumor. When we attack cancer, we need to make sure we “get the queen” so to speak. If I get 99.9% of cells and leave these stem cells behind, your tumor could grow back stronger than ever. Of course, cancer isn’t even just one disease, and it’s rarely as simple as that. But the closer we get to the annihilating the origins of tumors and the factories that produce the out-of-control mutant cells, the stronger our cancer therapies will be. Remember, not every stem cell is a friendly one. (via Nature News)
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Cancer Stem Cells: New Proof of the “Queen Bee” Behind Tumor Cells

Cancer is a tricky beast. Even if a tumor is detected early, if the drugs, radiation or surgery don’t kill every single cell that’s become cancerous, it can come back stronger than ever. One of the theories behind this is that tumors contain a subset of stem cells. Just like the stem cells that are present in embryos and the ones we use for medical technologies, cancer stem cells are thought to “feed” the rest of the tumor by dividing indefinitely. They are a constant source of new, deadly cells, and cancer therapies often miss them.

A bunch of new studies are making this “cancer stem cell” theory sound a bit more certain. Several experiments recently tracked cancer cells in mice using fluorescent markers like you see above. By shrinking, attacking and seeding the tumors in different ways, they were all able to show that there is almost certainly a stem cell population in a tumor.

When we attack cancer, we need to make sure we “get the queen” so to speak. If I get 99.9% of cells and leave these stem cells behind, your tumor could grow back stronger than ever. Of course, cancer isn’t even just one disease, and it’s rarely as simple as that.

But the closer we get to the annihilating the origins of tumors and the factories that produce the out-of-control mutant cells, the stronger our cancer therapies will be. Remember, not every stem cell is a friendly one.

(via Nature News)

Source: nature.com

How Prostate Cancer Works

Just a tad late for Father’s Day, but every day is a good day to raise awareness about cancer education and prevention. Prostate cancer is the second biggest cancer killer in the United States and the U.K. Do you understand the basics of cancer?

AsapSCIENCE, a new YouTube channel that tells general science stories in the style of MinutePhysics, put together this animation highlighting the checkpoints in your cells that fight cancer and how they go wrong when the disease takes over. You’ll learn not only how the cells lose control, but why risks increase with age and perhaps why some parts of the world have higher rates than others. Give them a follow!

(by AsapSCIENCE)

Source: youtube.com

Signals - Visualizing Cancer Protein Networks

Although there’s (only?) ~25,000 genes in the human genome, our bodies are estimated to make somewhere between 250,000 and one million different proteins (although any given cell probably only expresses maybe 10,000 at a time). This is because almost any given gene can have its coding message (called mRNA) shuffled in several different ways, resulting in different protein sequences from the same original gene.

That’s a lot of proteins. How can we visualize the myriad networks by which these proteins interact and co-regulate the cell and each other? How do you connect a million dots to create a meaningful picture of the cell’s machinery? Animations like this represent efforts to draw that picture.

It shows the interactions between proteins in a cancer cell. Cancer cells are constantly evolving, becoming evolutionary mosaics of broken cells, each competing to beat out its neighbors. Some cancers require a malfunction in only one protein to go awry, but most require multiple errors to occur. In the animation, the connections and interactions themselves change over time as the cancer cell continues to morph and evolve. These manifest as shifting arcs and lines.

(video by Casey REAS)

Source: vimeo.com

No, a Universal Cancer Vaccine Was Not Just Developed

You might have seen this news come across your dashboard, Twitter feed or Facebook wall (via The Telegraph):

“Universal Cancer Vaccine Developed”

Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it’s not true, despite tens of thousands of shares on social networks. I’m not a buzzkill, I promise. I’m just a science guy with a frustrating attachment to reality. So what’s behind the story?

What is true:

  • Israeli scientists are trying to create a vaccine against a molecule that’s expressed on the outside of 90% of known cancer cell types.
  • The molecule, called MUC1, is a sugar-protein that helps cells form outer structure, and the version of MUC1 on cancer cells is different from normal cells.
  • A vaccine that let the body learn to attack only the bad MUC1 could turn the immune system against cancers before they got out of control while not harming healthy cells.

Here’s what is exaggerated:

  • While many cancers express this mutant MUC1, even a single tumor can have huge, complex diversity in its genes. That usually means that therapies that attack only one cancerous change or mutation will leave behind some small population of unaffected, dangerous cells.
  • Vaccines, even against viruses, rarely show 100% effectiveness. It’s really important to remember that cancers continue to evolve as a tumor grows. And even one cell that doesn’t get killed by this method could grow into a tumor all on its own.
  • This is not the first drug therapy that has tried to exploit MUC1 as a target. The clinical trial here is of 10 patients, and only one cancer type. There are 30 other trials of other MUC1 therapies going on, some that are closer to finishing.
  • If something like this was really a “Universal Cancer Vaccine”, wouldn’t it go into Science or Nature or The Lancet instead of The Telegraph?

That being said, it’s a good example of trying to find a way that cancer cells differ from normal cells and using the body’s own machinery to kill the tumor before it even gets big enough to be detected by doctors. It’s also an example of science news hype pulled straight from a press release (something called “churnalism”).

But cancer is not a universal disease, and likewise no cancer treatment will ever be universal.