Cells become cancerous through a multi-step process. The cells pick up several mutations, each clearing a natural limit on cell division and usually increasing the rate at which the cells divide. By the time a person gets old their body has many pre-cancerous clumps of cells, and cancer occurs when one of the cells in one of the clumps picks up a final mutation and becomes fully cancerous.<\/p>\n
Cancer has proven very difficult to treat, but perhaps it is easier to treat at the pre-cancerous stage. The idea would be to treat healthy people at middle age or later and kill most of their pre-cancerous cells. This would make the pool of cells that can develop into cancer much smaller and reduce the incidence of cancer.<\/p>\n
Chemical chemotherapy drugs would be a poor choice for this–I expect they are not effective on slowly dividing pre-cancerous cells and these drugs are also damaging. <\/p>\n
Instead, it may be possible to trigger apoptosis (cell suicide) in pre-cancerous cells. These cells are losing their differentiation and activating abnormal signaling pathways. They are likely stressed and may already be primed to undergo apoptosis. One of the organism’s anti-cancer mechanisms is to trigger apoptosis in pre-cancerous cells. The idea here is to supercharge this mechanism.<\/p>\n
So the idea would be to treat the person with a cocktail of drugs that induces apoptosis by activating the apoptotic signaling pathways. The treatment should be strong enough to trigger a wave of apoptosis in the most susceptible cells clearing most pre-cancerous cells from the body. There would be some normal cells killed as well but they will be replaced by normal tissue processes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cells become cancerous through a multi-step process. The cells pick up several mutations, each clearing a natural limit on cell division and usually increasing the rate at which the cells divide. By the time a person gets old their body has many pre-cancerous clumps of cells, and cancer occurs when one of the cells in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-ideas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}