Stopping ATP Production in Tumor Cells

It's not my field, but I would think there are a lot of things you could inject into cancer cells to halt their growth or kill them. The problem is the cancers where the cells metastasize and you cannot find them. The trick is finding something that harms cancer cells much more than normal cells.

The best way to attack cancer is to gut viruses and retarget them for the particular cancer cell type with a deadly chemical bullet...

https://medicine.yale.edu/whr/news/article.aspx?id=14848

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/next-wave-cancer-cures-could-come-nasty-viruses-180951545/

http://www.postbulletin.com/life/health/mayo-clinic-uses-measles-virus-to-kill-cancer/article_3ac9ec8b-8b94-572c-b2ed-a500541f1cef.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4576953/

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/arleneweintraub/2016/12/29/four-cancer-killing-viruses-to-watch-in-2017/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/

The trouble with things that are alive (e.g. viruses) is that they have their own agenda (evolving to survive) and may not do just what you want them to do.

That's why you gut them and just use the shell which allows you access to the body without rejection or attack....

Claiming a virus to be living is an iffy proposition in itself. One evolutionary proposal is that mitochondria may be the most successful virus ever introduced to this planet.

A virus needs to hijack a cell in order to reproduce, so I suppose it is alive sometimes and not at others. The important factor is that it can reproduce and potentially mutate, and natural selection will select for the fittest to survive. These fittest to survive may not be carrying out our wishes.

"....A virus needs to hijack a cell in order to reproduce...."

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Kind of like how a male needs to hijack a female in order to reproduce.

Is that how you count successful relationship? By the degree to which the male (you) can hijack the female? WOwoow!

In terms of biology, you are close. Fitness would be measured by the offsping produced to carry an individuals germline, but to get to success the measure needs to encompass not only how many offspring are produced but also how prolific the offspring are....

...so how many fertile females your male offspring successfully hijack and how many successful hijackings your female offspring arrange themselves central to that theme... and additionally any successful incidence of parthenogenesis.

....but that was your own fascination taking you on that sidetrack.

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I was pointing out the contradiction of any live male claiming viruses are not alive (in the framework of a belief in an unambiguous cut and dry life/not life categorization) in that if viruses are not alive because they must hijack a host, then males are not alive becuase they must 'hijack' a female.

Get it?

OH, I most definitely got your analogy. Usually in the animal kingdom, certainly among mammals, the male of the species needs to express his dominance not just over females, but over all males in the area, to obtain exclusive rights to inseminate the females. If that existed in the human population, I sense a conspiracy brewing to dethrone the bastard king, as per William Wallace. Long Live Scotland!

A virus is just a bag of instructions, it shows no signs of life, no respiration, no waste, no intake at all....They are just random bits of information and survive by happenstance, there is no intention or intelligence involved....Certain virus types can enter the body undetected by our body's defences, this is facilitated by the coating or bag that the virus is contained in....If you remove the virus and keep the coating or bag you can genetically engineer a mechanism to attack certain cell types thereby having an accurate delivery system for destroying certain types of cells, in this case cancer cells....What it does in some cases is merely paint a chemical target on the cells that identifies the cell in question as an intruder alerting the immune system to attack it...

This would be akin to the monoclonal antibody attack or gentetic targeting in use today. The introduction of chemicals with a deadly carrier that only get adsorbed by the diseased cell vs healthy local cells

The problem has never been how to kill cancer cells. The problem is how to kill cancer cells without killing the patient. Remember, all cancer cells were once healthy patient cells. In virtually every way they appear to be identical to normal cells. Remember also that the patients immune system has already either accepted the cancer cells as either healthy patient cells or failed to kill these rogue cells without killing the patient.

The amount of inappropriate capitalization suggests a fascination with talismanic or magical thinking, and possibly quack medicine.

Sharp analysis...

Inject hydroxide ions? Somehow just those ions, or say KOH in solution (be still my heart)?

Yes it woukd kill the nearby cells if a meaningful amount were injected.

Yes the concentration would decrease with distance from the injection.

Cyanide also works very effectively at shutting down cellular respiration.

I think you need a revision course in biochemistry. ATP synthase is not a motor protein. Yes, you can inhibit cellular metabolism (all over, not just in the generation of ATP) by rendering the surroundings alkaline, but you have to remember that the mitochondria are intracellular, and there is no way in which you can achieve multiple intracellular injections. Also you have to realise that you cannot inject OH- ions on their own; they have to be accompanied by a cation which is likely to be unpleasant to healthy cells as well as the cancer cells.

This is quite apart from the difficulty already pointed out by others, namely that cancers metastasise into multiple small groups, which are not detectable or injectable until they have grown into large groups.

Thank you for the correction. The ATP synthase "enzyme" appears and functions somewhat like a nano-turbine.

I don't understand the need for a "multi-cellular" injection. If the hydrogen ions could be hijacked at any point in the respiratory chain they would not be available to power the motor enzyme.

If the cancer has not yet metastasized it is a non issue?

I was not suggesting a "cure" here? Perhaps simply a way of shutting down ATP production in a bit more of a benign way, than lets say, cyanide; for the purpose of reducing the growth rate or size of an isolated tumor.

The issue of healthy tissue damage was addressed?

all biological matter exists within a narrow pH window. Mess with that, and you will have major survival issues. I think this is a non-starter, and a really poor idea.

"All life exists within a narrow ph window."

Interesting.

Interesting and WRONG! (Well maybe an ambiguous simplification into a wrong statement.)

There are acidophile bacteria that thrive at a pH of 2. In my stomach there is one some believe help us to digest certain foods. At the very least I couldn't digest anything if my stomach were not a very acidic environment.

There are also alkaliphile bacteria that survive a pH of 11.

Now each species of life has a relatively narrow ±1 pH range where it will thrive but remember the pH scale is a logarithmic scale. Two decades of concentration levels is not really very narrow.

Thanks for the knowledge.

I have been led to believe that ph is relative to the free hydrogen ions in the solution.

The higher the concentration of hydrogen ions the more acidic the solution.

I had NO IDEA there was such a narrow ph window for different life forms. That is quite interesting.

Let us take this step by step:

1. The word enzyme has a precise meaning. It is not a new word and does not need to appear in quotes.

2. Yes, there is a rotation of a portion of the ATP synthase molecule, but the word turbine also has a precise technical meaning which does not apply here.

3. The multiple intracellular injections which I mentioned would be necessary if you were focussed on specifically interrupting the H+ flow in the mitochondria. I'm not at all sure why you are focussing on that, when you do understand that altering the hydrogen ion balance of the whole cell would be just as effective. Yes, a single injection of any noxious agent in the centre of a tumour will be effective, but it is not specifically going to affect the mitochondria, let alone the ATP synthase.

4. Metastasis of cancers is an issue, as there are very few that do not metastasise.

5. If you are not suggesting a cure than what is the point of your suggestion?

6. there are many more effective ways of treating tumours than attempting to shut down their ATP production.

7. No, the issue of healthy tissue damage was not addressed. Even if you had arrived at a dosage calculation based on the diameter of a tumour assumed to be a perfect sphere, there will still be errors in the calculation because tumours are not always perfect spheres. Furthermore, not only do they regularly encroach on other tissues but they also have blood vessels running through them which can carry your noxious injection elsewhere.

Thank you for the english lesson. Shame on me.

If it looks like a turbine, rotates like a turbine, and uses mechanical impulse to induce rotation - it is a turbine. The fact that it is a complex biological system makes it no less so.

" there are many more effective ways of treating tumours than attempting to shut down their ATP production." - Really? Care to share the details.
"arrived at a dosage calculation based on the diameter of a tumour assumed to be a perfect sphere, "---- ohh brother.

I realize that this doesn't answer your direct questions, but Astaxanthin inhibits tumor growth as described here. Bee pollen does too as described here. Many others may do it too. The following have been shown to inhibit some type of cancer:

Asparagus, Astaxanthin, Bee Pollen, Beets (red), Blueberry extract, Butyric acid, Cayenne, Chamomile, Chaparral, Cherry extract, Choline, Cranberry, Garlic, Feverfew, Germanium, Ginseng, Glutathione, Honey (raw), Lycopene, Milk thistle, Molybdenum, Olive oil, Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids, Psyllium, Red Clover, Spirulina, Quercetin, Vitamin E.

There are likely more to add to this list.

You left off tumeric.

I sure did. Thanks.

Are we talking people, mice, or what? If it's people then:

30-foods-to-help-prevent-cancer

These colloquial "preventions" always seem to mistake correlation for causation.

I believe injection of caustic into some localized area might kill whatever is in that area, and leave a necrotic dead mess around where the corrosive material ate away other tissue, until it could be neutralized by the body.

I would not.

Yes that's a salient point, people have died by successful cancer treatment in that it killed or shrank the tumor that had corrupted several neighboring bodies rendering a hole as damaging perhaps as a gunshot....many more have been killed by chemotherapy itself....

..."There are more than 100 types of cancer, characterized by abnormal cell growth. There are many different causes, ranging from radiation to chemicals to viruses; an individual has varying degrees of control over exposure to cancer-causing agents.

Cancer cells, and how they grow, remain unpredictable and in some cases mysterious. Even after seemingly effective treatments, crafty cancer cells are able to hide out in some patients and resurface.

About $200 billion has been spent on cancer research since the early 1970s, and the five-year survival rate for all people diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. has risen from about 50 percent in the 1970s to 65 percent today."...

https://www.livescience.com/11041-10-deadliest-cancers-cure.html

..."For the first time researchers looked at the numbers of cancer patients who died within 30 days of starting chemotherapy, which indicates that the medication is the cause of death, rather than the cancer.

The study by Public Health England and Cancer Research UK found that across England around 8.4 per cent of patients with lung cancer, and 2.4 per cent of breast cancer patients died within a month."...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/30/chemotherapy-warning-as-hundreds-die-from-cancer-fighting-drugs/

I once thought the survival rate from chemo was so low that it was less than the rate of misdiagnosis.

Gavilan:

There is balance of ADP and ATP in the cell energy demand mechanism. ADP Adenine-di-phosphate to ATP Adenine-tri-phosphate conversion stores the energy. ATP to ADP is production of energy.

If you burn all ATP then cell may locally burn but it may cause a chain reaction similar to KCN Potassium Cyanide poisoning and quick death.

Tempering with ATP isn't a kind of child's play.

I think NAD/NADH are the real shaker and mover here, as these "wind up" the ATP "spring."

Any inhibitor that shuts down NADH is a real bad actor in biology.

"a chain reaction similar to KCN Potassium Cyanide poisoning and quick death."

Really; hydroxide is that toxic?