Darwin's cancer fix

I do not know how much Max’s opinion above is valid but I would think that the article at the Scientific American refers to those patients with metastatic cancer who have failed radical treatments and to whom chemo or ADT did not do well due to genetic mutations. The 3/4^th numbers in death count could be from the small number of systemic patients in PCa cases. One needs to read the whole article buying the magazine or inquire the authors.

This sort of involvement of the Darwin’s principle on "natural selection" in both; the formation of cancer and its resistance to treatments, is well understood from the superb works of the Nobel laureates in medicine (2018), Dr. James P. Allison and Dr. Tasuku Honjo. They found those switches in cells that allow or prohibit the killing of a cell.

Regarding the authors of the article; James DeGregori is a doctor and professor in Biochemistry. He is a researcher and has written about biological processes at the cellular and molecular levels. Robert Gatenby is a nuclear physician specialist in imagenology. He is also a researcher and wrote several articles based on Cancer Biology and Evolution, which themes applies chemistry, physiology, and biology to investigate the chemistry of living systems and molecular genetics.

In any case, the title of this thread made me curious as I have also researched deeply and written before in this forum (in 2011) on the Darwin’s theory in PCa matters. Surely things have developed much along these years in regards to the genetics and their influence in cancer affairs. We know now more and what used to be pilot projects are now fully settled treatments with successful outcomes. You can read some of my discussions in this link;
https://csn.cancer.org/comment/1013947#comment-1013947

Thanks RonJT for posting this subject.

Best to all,

VGama

Robert Gatenby, he is a radiologist by training and heads the radiology department at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.  He is studying theoretical and experimental models of evolutionary dynamics in cancer and cancer drug resistance and a tumor's physical microenvironment.Gatenby felt there must be a better way to treat cancer—to outsmart it rather than carpet-bomb.    Gatenby was concerned with the treatment of cancer in some cases killing the patient.  A friend of his came to the clinic on a Friday, took his treatment and was dead by Monday.  My cut is more power to the researchers if they can find a way to treat the prostate cancer effectively without gutting or nuking the cancer then more power to them.  To me, it is kind of like this, you go out there and try to totally take out that fire ant mound.  Looks like you killed them all.  In a week or so they are building another mound. Anyway, hope this is not too trivial for some of you folks.  Please look Robert Gatenby up.  You may find it interesting reading.

Lighterwood;

Your post on Robert Gatenby is very interesting and not trivial at all. It seems that he has at his own disposal the whole facilities at Moffitt Cancer Center so that he manages to use the laboratories in his researches. The staff also may be working under his directions. Interestingly he uses mathematics in oncology models probably creating them for uses by other researchers. One of my good friends here is an applied mathematics professor that has been involved in creating mathematic models for medical researchers at Tsukuba University in Japan. Surely I will take the opportunity in obtaining from him some news on recent studies regarding PCa. I enjoyed watching the video on Imaging Tumor Heterogeneity.

https://www.pathlms.com/wmis/events/625/video_presentations/34022

Georges;

I also think that more researches should be done on the dependency that prostatic cells have in androgens. Regulating its dependency could lead in balancing low or high activity of prostatic cells. Indolence could be induced in manners lesser invasive than the typical treatment used today.
So far, much has been done in the sense of avoiding prostatic cells from absorbing the stuff (for their survival) but nothing proper has been done to change its dependency on androgens. In genetic studies researchers have identified some genes involved in mutations (at the androgen receptors of cells) but nobody speaks on findings that turn cells indolent when some sort of genes are not present.

Treatments also are based in diminishing or avoiding the amount of testosterone in circulation, or avoiding its absorption by cells. This is still the present standards of ADT that come from 1941 when Charles Huggins discovered PCa dependency on testosterone for survival.

Many factors are involved and the mechanism of the endocrine system is complicated. Please read these links;

https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6320/6/3/82/htm

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023144

Best

VGama

Hi there,

There is a link between Gleason Score and the time to androgen independence just like there is a link between Gleason Score and metastases.
Low Gleason Scores take longer to reach androgen independence just like they metastase less readily.
This is because they are more like normal prostate cells with high androgen dependence, Gleason 10 cells have really thrown off almost all of the properties of prostate cells and are getting on with the serious business of being cancer cells.
It is also worth noting that ADT with radiation is more effective with grade 8 and below in comparison with grade 9 and 10. One could suppose that lower grades suffer more from the androgen deprivations so are more susceptable to the effects of the radiation.

Best wishes,

Georges