Surviving-Cancers.com

Anyone who knows me knows I am not a big fan of chemotherapy, having seen several deaths related more to chemotherapy than to the cancer it is intended to kill.  Still, there are situations where researchers have not yet developed alternative therapies and chemo is the best alternative for treatment.

The idea behind chemotherapy treatment is that cancer cells grow and divide more quickly than the surrounding normal cells.  The faster the cell growth, the more rigorously chemotherapy acts on it.

A major problem is that the rest of the cells of the body continue growing, albeit at a lesser rate than the cancer cells and damage is done to these other tissues.  Doctors have recognized for quite some time that if they could stop non-cancer cells from growing, they could reduce the collateral damage.

An early study by a group led by Valter Longo at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of the USC Keck School of Medicine and in the lab of Lizzia Raffaghello at Gaslini Children’s Hospital in Genoa, Italy showed that two days of fasting prior to administration of chemotherapy would put most normal cells into a maintenance mode characterized by extreme resistance to stresses.  This tends to protect the cells from the chemotherapy.

The cancer cells, by their nature constantly active, did not develop this resistance and remained sensitive to the chemotherapy.  Further studies of the effects of fasting are planned.

Can you believe that methadone is being used as a treatment for leukemia?

I find it interesting that a product or drug, developed for one purpose, can end up being a solution for an entirely different problem.

The one that comes to mind is Minoxidyl, the drug developed for treatment of hypertension.  It was noticed that those who were treated with the drug began to grow hair.  Eventually this led to a topical version which is commonly used to treat baldness.

Recently, as reported in the August issue of Cancer Research, the journal of the American Association of Cancer Research, It was discovered that methadone, the drug used to break addiction to opiates such as heroin, has the ability to kill treatment resistant Leukemia cells.

Methadone, originally developed in Germany in the 1930s attacks the cancer cells without affecting the normal blood cells.  It turns out that some cancer cells have opioid receptors and methadone  kills those cells.  Along with leukemia cells, human lung cancer cells have been tested and found to be susceptible to methadone treatment.

In the study cited, Dr. Claudia Friesen of the Institute of Legal Medicine at the University of Ulm in Germany tested methadone on lymphoblastic leukemia T-cells and human myeloid leukemia cells.

Methadone was found to be as affective as standard chemotherapy and radiation treatments on non-resistant leukemia cells.  Non-leukemic peripheral blood lymphocytes survived the treatment.  The treatment also killed leukemia cells resistant to chemotherapy and radiation.

It was discovered that methadone activates the mitochondrial pathway within leukemia cells which activates enzymes called caspases that prompt a cell into apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death.  While chemotherapy drugs also use this approach, methadone also reversed deficient activation in chemo resistant leukemia cells.

Studies continue to see what other cancers may be suitable for this treatment.