How to Starve Cancer

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You could see that my approach had slowed the tumor’s growth,” said McLelland. “I may have had that tumor for a long time. That was actually quite reassuring for me.” We have determined that this metabolic defect is present in 90 percent of sarcomas,” said senior author Brian A. Van Tine, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine. “Healthy cells don’t have this weakness. We have been trying to create a therapy that takes advantage of the metabolic defect because, in theory, it should target only the tumor. Basically, the defect allows us to force the tumor cells to starve.” A cancer diagnosis was terrifying enough, but what McLelland struggled with most was the fact that she would never be able to have her own biological children.

According to doctors and cancer statistics, she should have lived only about 12 weeks after receiving her diagnosis of stage IV cancer. McLelland was reluctant about writing her book, but she felt she had a duty to share with the world what she had discovered—and what had saved her life. Because cancer is a term that encapsulates many different diseases—with different changes in different metabolic pathways in different cells in different parts of the body—no single metabolic therapy is right for every person. What makes one cancer grow more slowly could conceivably hasten another. Just as avoiding excessive sugar is crucial for people with diabetes, lest they lose their vision and feet, sugar can save the life of a person with critical hypoglycemia. For a long time, the prevailing thought was that altered metabolism in cancer cells was the result of genes and mutations that determined metabolism,” says Jason Locasale, a cancer biologist at Duke University. “Now, as we know, it’s a complex interaction of environment and genes, and one of the major factors at play is nutrition.” That growth activity requires energy, and so cancer cells metabolize nutrients in different ways from the healthy cells around them. In an attempt to kill the tumor without killing the normally functioning cells, chemotherapy drugs target these pathways inside of cancer cells. This is notoriously difficult, expensive, and prone to toxic side effects that account for much of the suffering associated with the disease.Now, 18 years after her initial cancer diagnosis—after battling cervical, lung, and blood cancers—McLelland is living the life of her dreams. She married the love of her life, and through the selflessness of a surrogate, was able to have two sons of her own.

Just like the cervical cancer, Jane’s lung cancer was initially misdiagnosed (this time as a chest infection). But the benefit of having the improperly read X-ray from four months prior—along with the properly diagnosed X-ray—was the ability to see the rate at which the cancer was growing. Around the same time, an international team of researchers concluded in the journal Science Signaling that “only some cancer cells are acutely sensitive to glucose withdrawal, and the underlying mechanism of this selective sensitivity is unclear.” In other words, a low-sugar diet could help combat some cancers, but it’s certainly not as simple as Cancers eat sugar, so low sugar stops cancer. This strategy could be applied beyond rare sarcoma tumors because the metabolic defect is often present in other cancers, including certain types of breast, colon, lung, brain and bone tumors, the researchers said. The new study includes data showing similar anti-tumor responses in cell lines from these cancer types. Van Tine also pointed out that all of the drugs used in the study are either already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for other conditions or in ongoing clinical trials investigating cancer drugs. Her diet and numerous supplements were already helping on that front—particularly berberine, hydroxycitrate, gymnema, curcumin, niacin, and pycnogenol—all of which were inhibiting key pathways that are abnormal in cancer. She also underwent treatment with high-dose intravenous vitamin C.I already knew that statins would be potentially useful against cervical cancer. But research had also shown that they caused apoptosis in acute myeloid leukemias. I also had overlooked the fact that NSAIDs could cause cell death (apoptosis),” said McLelland. “What I learned from the Life Extension article was that there was a synergy between the two drugs, making them far more potent when taken together.” All of these drugs are cheap and off-patent, which is why they have largely been ignored by the pharmaceutical industry, despite research supporting their effectiveness against cancer,” said McLelland.