Researchers at the University of Southern California have discovered that making mice fast prior to intensive chemo treatments protected them from the side effects. Could the results make it so humans can survive cancer treatments with the same response?
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48 hour fast was enough to protect from such intensive chemo that wiped out much of the cancer they had.
It's now time to see if fasting is the way to go for humans. Valter Longo, an Italian researcher team has applied to run a small clinical trial on California cancer patients.
"We were able to treat with a very high dose of chemo and the animals were running around like we didn't give them anything," said lead author Valter Longo, an Italian researcher at the University of Southern California.
Also in the works are developing a specialized diet that would achieve the same protective effects for cancer patients about to have intensive chemo treatments.
Researchers have already shown that the starvation response protects against other medical stresses like heat shock and to protect the liver's cell death from use of acetaminophen. Before Longo's team tried the 48 hour fast on mice they had in tested the response of chemotherapy drugs in yeast, human and rat cells.
Not only were the test subjects able to tolerate the chemo side effects better the cancer cells in their body had no protection from the blast of drugs.
Within four days after the chemo treatments the mice had regained most of the weight they had lost during the two days of fasting.
More than half of the mice that were not starved died of toxicity from the chemo while only one of the 28 mice who fasted died.
Not all of the cancer was eliminated from the mice with the one treatment. The life span though was doubled because of the test.
Longo's team is still working to see if multiple chemo treatments will totally cure the starved mice of their cancers.
"Ideally, you want to kill all the cancer cells, but if you think about it, it might not even be necessary to get to that level," he said.
"You can't necessarily expect to kill all the cancer cells based on the cancer, but this could allow you to keep it under control - if it works - by doing many, many different cycles of chemo.
Because of the simplicity of this treatment if it works on the mice it will be able to go to human trials much faster.
Eventually this is going to work," he told AFP.
"We just have to find the equivalent... is it 48 hours, or is it 48 hours plus maybe targeting certain receptors in certain genes? We know the system pretty well we just have to find the equivalent. I'm confident that within a year or two we'll have that."
To think that cancer survival could boil down to something as simple as fasting.
