Cancer Research: Why you should care

Cancer affects everyone and is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. Chemotherapy and immunotherapy are common treatments, but they have their downsides. Chemotherapy kills both cancer and healthy cells, leading to side effects. Immunotherapy shows promise but is expensive and not effective for all cancers. Policy changes and increased research are needed to improve access and affordability of treatments. Research is being done on reprogramming cancer cell metabolism to starve them. It is important to advocate for better access to effective treatments and stay informed about healthcare. Hello, welcome to my podcast, my name is Layla Imani and today we will be discussing cancer research and why you should care. So have you or a loved one been personally affected by cancer? Obviously when thinking about that question we all hope that the answer is no, but the reality of it is that cancer affects all of us. So we're going to delve into the world of cancer treatment, specifically the negative effects and the access to chemotherapy or immunotherapy. These two treatment options, they have revolutionized cancer care, but they come with their own set of challenges. Some general background is that cancer is a disease that involves the uncontrolled proliferation and for my non-science audience that would be multiplication of cells causing various harmful effects to bodily functions or even death. In 2020 alone, 19.3 million people were diagnosed with cancer and there were 10 million cancer related deaths globally. The population affected by cancer, it crosses the lines of race, sex and class and the number of people affected by cancer and cancer related deaths are only expected to increase due to factors such as the increasing life expectancies and the higher population growth rates. So something about cancer is that it's generally accepted to have six main capabilities and these include evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death, sustaining proliferative signaling, enabling replicative immortality, inducing slash accessing vasculature, activating invasion and metastasis and those are the factors that kind of distinguish tumors from healthy cells. What's interesting is that in recent years, reprogramming cellular metabolism and avoiding immune destruction are also parameters that have been recognized to be shared among various tumor types. Cancer therapies that are on the market target a variety of these capabilities, but more work kind of needs to be done to gain insight into how cancer cells reprogram cellular metabolism in order for a therapy to target this capability. So basically what cancer does is that it loves to multiply and it eats differently than our normal cells do. Some drugs kill the dividing cells by damaging part of the cell's control center, so kind of what controls the cell and tells the cell to do, I'm sure we've learned about the nucleus and how that's the control center in the brain of the cell and others, they interrupt the chemical processes involved in cell division. So let's start with chemotherapy. I'm sure you've heard of it, most of us have, as it's the main treatment for earlier stage cancers and it's been a mainstay of cancer treatment for decades. It's effective in many cases, but it's not without its downsides. Chemotherapy is a medical treatment that uses drugs to target and kill rapidly dividing cells in the body. It is most commonly associated with the treatment of cancer, but it can be used for various other medical conditions, such as autoimmune diseases and certain types of infections. The primary goal of chemotherapy in cancer treatment is to target and destroy the cancer cells. Chemotherapy drugs can be administered in various ways. It can be injected, it can be taken as an oral medication, or even topical application depending on the cancer type and its stage. While chemotherapy can be highly effective in treating cancer and improving a patient's prognosis, it often comes with side effects. These side effects can include nausea, vomiting, hair loss, fatigue, and a weakened immune system. Chemotherapy not only affects cancer cells, but also damages some healthy cells. If you think about chemotherapy, you can't think of it as a drug that you take and it just goes and does exactly what you want it to do. It kind of targets everything which is really detrimental to patient health, but as it kills everything it also kills the cancer that is even affecting the patient in the first place. It's worth noting that chemotherapy is usually part of a broader cancer treatment plan. It may include surgery, radiation therapy, and other types of medical interventions. The specific treatment approach depends on the type of cancer, the stage, and the individual patient's overall health and medical history. I did mention access, but the chemotherapy is another issue. In some regions, patients face barriers such as high costs, limited healthcare infrastructure, and even geographical challenges that make receiving chemotherapy difficult. So let's talk about the promises and the challenges of immunotherapy. Immunotherapy has shown remarkable promise, with some patients experiencing long-term remissions. It often has fewer side effects compared to chemotherapy, making it a preferred choice for many, and as we discussed earlier, some of the main capabilities that make cancer what it is are the ability to invade other tissue and invade immune destruction. Some immunotherapy treatments help the immune system stop or slow the growth of cancer cells, others help the immune system destroy cancer cells or stop the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body. Now let's turn our attention to the challenges in immunotherapy. There are high costs in the realm of immunotherapy, and it's also not effective for all cancer types. Its high costs can limit access for many patients, and it's essential to keep in mind that despite its success, there is still much research to be done to fully understand and improve this treatment. So what can we do to address these challenges and ensure that more patients have access to the most effective cancer treatments? One of those things is policy. So advocating for policies that improve access to these treatments, the government and health care organizations can play a pivotal role in making chemotherapy and immunotherapy more accessible and affordable for everyone. Increased public awareness can also contribute to this goal. Furthermore, investing in research and its development is essential to improve the effectiveness of cancer treatments. Continued innovation in the field of oncology will lead to a safer, more efficient, and more accessible option. And that's where my research comes into play. So we talked about the unique capabilities of cancer, and one of those is the fact that they have different cellular metabolism. So my research is basically, cancer likes to eat one thing, healthy cells like to eat another thing. If I feed what the healthy cells like to eat to just the healthy cells, and I feed what the healthy cells like to eat to cancer, I'm theorizing that the cancer cells will not be able to survive because they don't have what they need to eat. So now, in actual detail, what these things are is, it's involved with the cell cycle. So, how this actually works is that pyruvate is the metabolic precursor during oxygen phosphorylation, and glucose is the metabolic precursor during glycolysis. Because cancer prefers a very fast method of generating ATP, which is energy, they're going to go through glycolysis, and usually, cancer also doesn't have access to oxygen so they won't be able to do oxygen phosphorylation. The healthy cells would prefer a method of generating more ATP, which is oxygen phosphorylation. So if I feed the cells something that only one healthy cell type can eat, the healthy cells continue to survive while the cancer cells die. And that's kind of the theory behind my research. And a cancer treatment like this would reduce the issues that other treatment types have with cost-effectiveness, with treatment access, because it would literally just be feeding someone pyruvate. And that's like, obviously, the very basic theory behind it. So based off of everything that I've discussed today, I want to clarify that chemotherapy and immunotherapy, they both have their negative effects and access challenges, but they remain vital tools in the fight against cancer. It's essential to recognize these issues and address them through policy changes and through further research. And we have to ensure that every patient has the opportunity to benefit from the latest advancement in cancer research. Thank you for joining me today on Cancer Research, Why You Should Care. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to me. Remember, your health matters, and so does your voice in the conversation around health care. Until next time, stay informed and stay healthy.