Vanuatu. Vanuatu was meant to be the opposite of Nauru. So when you see this ghost island that's got, it's been strip mined. You can see it's almost like a cancer cell that's spread through the island and stripped away all the value and then you see all those structures collapsing. Let's got to Vanuatu and seesomething very different. So what I want to do before I show you more images is invoke another situation which is the idea of the "mix". I've been working
Because now we realized we had taken what is really a positive character, a logical image of the rugged individualist, and we've taken it so far that now we're like the cancer cell which has gone insane. And instead of recognizing its natural intelligence which would lead it to collaborate with other cells for the healthy functioning of the organ, the cancer cell is a
of all, it's fermenting, okay? That means it's getting energy from sources other than oxidative phosphorylation. You can take a cancer cell and and treat it with cyanide or azide or in absence of and still living. It's still growing because it's not using the oxygen pathway.
system. So, if there's a lot of demand, right, a lot of power is being generated or a lot of activity is happening like in a cancer cell , but there's not enough flow to to to to support that activity, then that increases resistance.
And since the year 2000, there still have been hundreds and hundreds of papers published of this cell line, referring to it as a breast cancer cell line. People haven't been paying attention.
So researchers decided to put it to the test. This is measuring cancer cell clearances, what we saw before, the effect of blood of those who ate a plant-based diet, in this case for an average of 14 years, along with mild exercise, like walking every day.
Same was true of melanoma cells, there was a nice pattern of gene expression in these cells. And when they got to this breast cancer cell , it was like, wait a second, that gene expression pattern does not match the other breast cancer cells. It actually has the same gene expression pattern as, in fact, one of the other melanoma cell lines in the collection.
greedy and it needs much more to make the same amount of ATP, which is energy. Mhm. So these a cancer cell can be very very greedy. It's not responding to oxygen in the same way. And they they're a bit more selfish. They start They start sort of multiplying without thought of the broader organism.
So, every cell in in this body is in a social contract with every other cell. Right? A cancer cell basically gets out of this agreement and says, "No, no, I'm going to fare for myself. I'm going to take all the energy I can and I'm going to make more of myself and it it goes into, you know, bacterial
What targeted therapy should we use? particular proteins that get turned on only when cancer cell -- only when breast cells are turning into cancer.
So they said, well, let's see what a healthy diet can do after just two weeks against three different types of human breast cancer? This is the before, cancer cell growth powering away to 100%, and then after, eating a plant-based diet for 14 days. Here's kind of a before picture, a representative photomicrograph, a photograph taken under a microscope.
We then, in the laboratory, try to identify a drug that selectively will inhibit that altered target that's making the cancer cell grow or something downstream from that drug target that'll kill the cancer cell . And then what is a major challenge-- and I'll talk to you about that for the second part of the talk-- is how do we identify
And that's what we tested in the lab after that. So what we did is we took a panel of cancer cell lines. We looked to see which ones had BRAF mutations, which ones had a mutation upstream called RAS that had already been discovered a few years prior,
he is I can tell you that he had um soup that day for lunch because there's a little bit of on his shirt still hanging out he was wearing a giant tie with a picture of a cancer cell in it and it was crooked and he was wearing one of those wide whale corduroy shirts with a leather patch notot because he was a hipster because he still had it from like the original 1970s fantastic so
And what we found in the laboratory was that these tumors that had BRAF mutations were selectively dependant upon BRAF. Because if you have a mutation, and the cancer cell is not dependant upon that mutation, then developing a drug that targets that mutation's probably not going to have too much of a dramatic effect.
Therefore, Warburg must be wrong. Uh-huh, we showed them that. We showed the cancer cell takes in oxygen, but it's not making energy through ATP in any great amount. It's using it for ROS, react- these radicals that further damage and cause the DNA mutations that
Yeah. Then the the the organism will in the tumor will try to make more blood vessels around it. Right, it's called angiogenesis. So, it's like the the cancer cell trying to decrease energy resistance. It says, "Bring me more oxygen." So, it's kind of like there's this sort of alien all of a sudden that decides it no longer wants to work with the rest of the organism, and that it's going to be
--that followed the evidence. And so at my lab at Harvard, which was studying cancer, we started to look at natural compounds that may impact breast cancer cell lines. And one of the compounds in the screen was actually the active bio-- the bioactive compound from turmeric, which was a spice that my grandmother used to think
your age group, your peer group, because as you likely know, as we get older, our sleep deteriorates, and so you want to have a group that you compare with. Or, alternatively, an app for detecting the first cancer cell in the blood, since most cancers have a vascular supply.
perspective that changes in metabolism, changes in the way electrons flow through through this energetic circuitry, through the mitochondria, can actually drive the instance of a of a new cancer cell . And then when it a cell becomes cancerous, ditches its its mitochondria, it goes back to this selfish state, and then it makes more of itself.
because the genes that were once turned on correctly in my young cells, that that control system, these broken chromosome. If you have a broken chromosome, if you don't fix that, you're either going to become a cancer cell or you're going to die. It's not
Or do we want blood circulating to every nook and cranny in our body, with the power to slow down and stop it? The same blood, now coursing through these women's bodies, gained the power to significantly slow down and stop breast cancer cell growth after just two weeks. Now, this dramatic strengthening in cancer defenses was after two weeks of diet and exercise.
Here's the experiment that really nailed IGF-1 as the villain. Same as last time, go on a plant-based diet, cancer cell growth drops, cancer cell death shoots up. But here's an interesting column here.
And I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about what these targets are and how we find them. We then, in the laboratory, try to identify a drug that selectively will inhibit that altered target that's making the cancer cell grow or something downstream from that drug target that'll kill the cancer cell .
the cancer cell which has gone insane. And instead of recognizing its natural intelligence which would lead it to collaborate with other cells for the healthy functioning of the organ, the cancer cell is a cell that says, I don't want to do that.
"Well, it affects the DNA adducts and here and here." Again, we don't really know how these drugs work. Most chemotherapy, I'll challenge you, I don't think chemotherapy has any data that it actually touches the cancer cell . It works, believe me, but it probably changes your system so the cancer doesn't want to grow anymore.