Heal Thyself

This post is about cancer, so first let’s make some jokes about superfoods. That works, doesn’t it?

I read a very funny article by Maggie Kelly yesterday. Her view of the clean eating mega-trend that is sweeping the first world. Among the gems, this:

Zucchini pasta is nothing like the real thing. It is like how those people in Argentina were selling rats on steroids as toy poodles. Just not the same.

The photo above is some zucchini ‘pasta’ I once made and thought about blogging. True.

And this.

To some of the more hard-core Clean Eaters telling them that I eat bread is like admitting I masturbate to old Adam Sandler movies whilst listening to One Direction and eating Skittle sandwiches. For them it’s weird, confusing and disturbing.

Before you think I am poking fun at you, disclaimer: I am riding that bandwagon myself. I have a kitchen full of chia seeds and gogi berries. My kids drink the occasional green smoothie – hell, there’s a huge bunch of kale sitting on the bench right this minute – and coconut products are spilling out of the fridge and pantry. It’s a superfood mecca here. I draw the line at pressing my own turmeric capsules but I have friends who do.

What the fantastic and yet slightly annoying trend indicates is a desire for we, the fat, unfit, unhealthy Western World to take our health into our own hands and work on healing. Work on creating and maintaining wellness rather than just fixing sickness. It’s good.

Scientists have been working through this stuff for years. They humbly lean over petri dishes and microscopes occasionally popping their heads up to say “ahh you might want to have a look at this” and bang, there’s a cure for polio or measles or cholera. Now the big strides are being made in the field of cancer research. They are just the coolest people.

I will try to explain cancer and some new research; the idea itself isn’t new but the progress being made is and it’s pretty amazing. Bear with me as I was born without science genes; I am just a science junkie with no insider knowledge.

New Scientist magazine reports that we are finally getting a leg up on finding a way to beat cancer, in this case melanoma, common here in Australia. This new approach has not only made the cells retreat, in some people they have disappeared altogether, within days and weeks in some cases. All thanks to the scientists teaching the good healing cells how to do their stuff.

In order to explain how the new treatment (still in the testing stages) works I have to first semi-plagiarise NS in order to explain how this cancer operates.

Cancer cells are good at hiding. What makes them so scary is they hide in plain sight. You can sometimes see a tumour growing right there on a body and that body’s own immune system simply can’t detect it.

The T cell is the antibody whose job it is to locate and destroy bad cells. The cancer cell grows a surface molecule called a ligand, like a little tentacle that can stick on to stuff. The ligand then binds on to the T cell (the good guy).

Once it has attached to the T cell, it instantly activates a receptor in the T cell called PD-1. You can guess the rest: Once PD-1 is activated, the ligand, along with its sneaky cancer cell becomes invisible to the good guys, the T cells. Tumours are now seen by the body as normal tissue.

Traditionally, cancer treatments have involved trying to kill off cancer cells, however this means killing a lot of good cells too, which is why some cancer patients become even sicker during treatment.

Scientists have worked out how to wake up these T cells. There are three antibodies that are being trialled. Two, Lambrolizumab and Nivolumab work on the PD-1 receptor and the third works on the cancer cell ligand. In each of the therapies, cancer disappeared altogether in nine of those on the trials (135 in one trial and 53 in another) and halved or more in another 75.

“Many effects happened very quickly, sometimes within three weeks,” says Jedd Wolchok of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who led the trial.

Wolchok says that what makes the antibody therapies so exciting is that unlike conventional cancer treatments, such as radio and chemotherapy, they work by reviving the power of the patient’s own immune system – something that has evolved to efficiently dispose of infectious, foreign or abnormal tissue. “They treat the patient, not the tumour,” he says. – New Scientist

All three drugs are now the subject of larger trials involving people with skin, kidney, lung and brain cancers. The third antibody trialled has already shown promising results with early trials of kidney and lung cancer.

So in a nutshell, scientists are working out how to get the body to heal itself from cancer, simply by being able to see the cancerous cells and then just do what it is already really good at. Healing itself. It’s exciting stuff.