DJ_DHANA
Here I'm gonna share something that I don't want you to share with everyone. In this month of Breast Cancer awareness, let me give you some insights on cancer relapse which is more prevalent in breast cancers. So why does cancer come back?
We might have heard of stories of the patients who had cancer relapse even after 10 years. There are instances when patients are told that they are cured of cancer and sent back home but later again diagnosed with cancer. So where does cancer go in these 10 years and how they manage to come back. So here is the possible reason or can I say a predictive hypothesis (under investigation)? When a cancer patient is being treated with a therapy (like targeted, chemo, radio, etc.,), the cancer cells that are metabolically active (vulnerable) takes up the drug and dies but few might still survive. How? They go into a metabolically inactive dormant (Sleep) state where they could take no more drugs, masking all the targets and might survive. They remain in this dormant state for a long period until all the therapies are resumed and when the conditions are quite favorable, it relapse back. So when it relapse, they behave more aggressively than they were ever before. Why? Think of someone who remained dormant for 10 years, the amount of energy it would've saved. That's why cancer is very difficult to treat after relapse. So the most important thing is, I don't want you to share this info with the cancer patients and scare them away as it's just a hypothesis with a lot of speculations and it's not yet accepted by the entire research community. But you can share this info with the research aspirants who wanna solve the critical healthcare problems. Having worked with cancer and stem cells, I fear that this hypothesis might be true in the long run.
Here I'm gonna share something that I don't want you to share with everyone. In this month of Breast Cancer awareness, let me give you some insights on cancer relapse which is more prevalent in breast cancers. So why does cancer come back?
We might have heard of stories of the patients who had cancer relapse even after 10 years. There are instances when patients are told that they are cured of cancer and sent back home but later again diagnosed with cancer. So where does cancer go in these 10 years and how they manage to come back. So here is the possible reason or can I say a predictive hypothesis (under investigation)? When a cancer patient is being treated with a therapy (like targeted, chemo, radio, etc.,), the cancer cells that are metabolically active (vulnerable) takes up the drug and dies but few might still survive. How? They go into a metabolically inactive dormant (Sleep) state where they could take no more drugs, masking all the targets and might survive. They remain in this dormant state for a long period until all the therapies are resumed and when the conditions are quite favorable, it relapse back. So when it relapse, they behave more aggressively than they were ever before. Why? Think of someone who remained dormant for 10 years, the amount of energy it would've saved. That's why cancer is very difficult to treat after relapse. So the most important thing is, I don't want you to share this info with the cancer patients and scare them away as it's just a hypothesis with a lot of speculations and it's not yet accepted by the entire research community. But you can share this info with the research aspirants who wanna solve the critical healthcare problems. Having worked with cancer and stem cells, I fear that this hypothesis might be true in the long run.
3 comments:
If cancer indeed works this way, then we could possibly prevent the dormant cancer cells from becoming active again by continuing the drugs in the lowest possible dosage. The dormant cancer cells is capable of sensing when it is favourable for becoming active again(i.e.,when there is no sign of drugs or other harmful agents that target cancer cells) , right? So, if we could make the conditions unfavourable for the dormant cells to become active again, then essentially we could beat the cancer relapse. What do your thoughts on this?
*What are your thoughts on this?
Hey Sakthi! Thank you for the very thoughtful question. It's nearly impossible to create unfavorable conditions by giving therapy (even at the low dosage) to a patient throughout the lifetime. Because it involves a lot of complications like drug resistance and side effects. So I think this is not a good approach to prevent cancer relapse. Rather, what we could do is, you can develop drugs targeting the dormant cancer stem cells or you can activate the dormant cancer stem cells and kill them with the therapy. Many research groups are currently working on it and I hope that they would be successful in the future.
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