From the first moment my wife discovered
she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even
ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have
received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than
mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started
this blog…
Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast
cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites,
journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and
share them with you.
There are lots of
kinds of sugar – lactose is one of them (as in, “Leonard Hofstadter is lactose
intolerant.”) Another kind of sugar is sucrose – that’s the kind that clings to
Apple Jacks. The third type most people recognize is glucose, most often when
paired with another word, as in “blood glucose”.
OK – we got that.
Sucrose, when we eat a bowlful of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs (Calvin and
Hobbes), is broken down in the body into glucose and fructose – another sugar
some people are familiar with, also known as “fruit sugar” by enzymes whose
purpose is to snap the bonds to make sugars the body can use.
Usually, a cell
will take the glucose that is moved around the body through the bloodstream,
pull it inside itself and let the super tiny organs (the science word is “organelles”)
that are the powerhouse of the cell (aka “mitochondria”) break it down even
farther so that the cell can use the energy to grow, divide, and stay healthy.
Cancer cells do
that to some extent, but scientists have long known that cancer cells FERMENT
sugar for energy. Most of us know what fermenting sugar does: it makes alcohol.
The cancer cell takes that product, breaks it down further. One of the proteins
– an enzyme, actually – that causes a cancer cell to ferment glucose instead of
sending it to the mitochondria is called SRC-3. It's this enzyme that can turn on the genes in a cell and set it on its way to becoming a cancer.
Fermentation doesn’t make as
much energy as the mitochondria can, but according to researchers, when the cell ferments
glucose instead of metabolizing it in the mitochondria, they discovered than an
enzyme (SRC-3) “which is overproduced in most cancer cells…transforms [another molecule
that] can turn on genes involved in abnormal growth, invasion, metastasis and
resistance to anti-cancer drugs. If cancer cells modify [a different molecule by
adding a chemical group, the molecule] becomes hyperactive, a hallmark of many
tumors.”
While the discovery and discussion is far from
being a treatment, the study group found that if they interfere with either molecule, they can stop the cancer cell cold and prevent breast cancer that has
been cured from returning or breaking out and growing somewhere else in the
body (metastasizing). So don't ask your doctor for the "sugar treatment" next week -- BUT there are some good signs that this might be a new way to treat metastasis.
I’ll be watching
for more news as time goes on!
Image: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/candh/images/2/20/CFSB.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20120306033841
No comments:
Post a Comment