CANCER STORY: Success & Hard Truth

Chemo Spreads and Makes Cancer More Aggressive

Compiled by Yeong Sek Yee & Khadijah Shaari

1. Perilous Approach: Avastin and Sutent Promote Growth of Breast Cancer Stem Cells

(Note: Many patients in Malaysia have been treated with this very expensive drug)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently revoked approval of Avastin for treating breast cancer. The reversal was in response to clinical trials showing that the drug’s benefit was short-lived, with breast cancer patients quickly relapsing and the cancer becoming more invasive and metastatic.

Cancer treatments designed to block the growth of blood vessels were found to increase the number of cancer stem cells in breast tumors in mice, suggesting a possible explanation for why these drugs don’t lead to longer survival, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

While anti-angiogenic drugs do shrink tumors and slow the time until the cancer progresses, the effect does not last, and the cancer eventually regrows and spreads.

The researchers treated mice with breast cancer using the anti-angiogenesis drugs Avastin (bevacizumab) and Sutent (sunitinib). The researchers found that tumors treated with these drugs developed more cancer stem cells, which fuel a cancer’s growth and spread and are often resistant to standard treatment.

2) Chemotherapy Can Make Cancers More Resistant To Treatment And Even Encourage Them To Grow

Chemotherapy treatment for some cancers may actually encourage tumours to grow, researchers have claimed.
The treatment triggers the healthy body cells around the tumour to produce a protein that helps the disease to resist treatment.
The surprise discovery suggests that some forms of the cancer treatment are doing more harm than good.

3) Chemo Does Not Cure: Often It Inflicts Damage and Spreads Cancer

German investigators from Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, have shown that Taxol (the “gold standard of chemo”) causes a massive release of cancer cells into circulation.

Such a release of cancer cells would result in extensive metastasis months or even years later, long after the chemo would be suspected as the cause of the spread of the cancer. This little known horror of conventional cancer treatment needs to be spread far and wide, but it is not even listed in the side effects of Taxol.

4) Chemo/Radiation “Therapy” May Fuel Cancer Spread

Treatment may fuel cancer’s spread
Treating cancer with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation may sometimes cause tumors to spread, researchers say.
Tests in mice show that using the chemotherapy drug Doxorubicin or radiation both raised levels of TGF-beta, which in turn helped breast cancer tumors spread to the lung.

5) Chemotherapy Causes Resistance and Spread of Cancer

Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle co-authored a study and published it in Nature Medicine this month detailing how chemotherapy not only produces resistance to chemotherapy by cancerous tumors but also stimulates its growth and metastasis (spread). Approximately 90% of people with metastatic cancer become resistant to chemotherapy. This occurs readily in cancers of the breast, prostate, lung, pancreas and colon.

6) Chemo Could Spread Cancer.

A new research published in Nature Medicine shows that chemotherapy can actually be extremely counterproductive in treating cancer as it could spur healthy cells to release a compound that actually stimulates cancer growth.

7) Chemotherapy can Backfire and Encourage Cancer Growth

Chemotherapy can backfire by triggering healthy cells to secrete a protein that sustains tumor growth, which could explain why some patients become resistant, a new study suggests.

8) Study Links Cancer’s Ability to Spread with Chemotherapy Resistance

Doctors who treat patients with breast cancer have known that tumors that develop resistance to chemotherapy are also more likely to grow larger and to spread, or metastasize, to other parts of the body.

9) Anti-Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Deadly

…..new research shows that aggressive treatment (used to shrink or remove even relatively small, slow-growing or encapsulated, harmless tumors) may create a situation where the entire body is riddled with highly aggressive cancers.

This study, published in the January 17, 2012 issue of Cancer Cell,finds that a group of little-explored cells that are part of every primary cancerous tumor likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis.

10) Anti-Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Deadly

Just imagine you were diagnosed with a cancerous tumor, and your doctor told you that his/her proposed treatment could reduce the size of your tumor by 30 percent, but at the same time increase your chances of developing secondary tumors by a whopping 300 percent!
That is exactly what is demonstrated in recent research (at Harvard and MD Anderson Cancer Centers), and published in conventional Oncology Journals! The history of conventional anti-cancer therapies is replete with cases where the treatment turned out to be far more devastating than the disease itself.

11) Exposed: Deadly Cancer Drugs Make Cancer Worse and Kill PatientsMore Quickly

Cancer drugs, pushed by many drug companies as the only ‘scientific’ method of combating cancer alongside chemotherapy, have been found to actually make cancer worse and kill patients more quickly.
The findings come after research was conducted on the cancer drugs at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Sold at a premium price to cancer sufferers, it turns out these drugs are not only ineffective but highly dangerous.

12) Breaking News: Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Aggressive And Deadly

…….scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB Department of Chemistry are currently investigating the very real possibility that dead cancer cells left over after chemotherapy spark cancer to spread to other parts of the body (metastasis).

· A study just published in the January 17 issue of the journal Cancer Cell concludes that anti-angiogenic therapies (which shrink cancer by cutting off tumors’ blood supply) may be killing the body’s natural defense against cancer by destroying pericyte cells that likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis.

13) Woops! Study Accidentally Finds Chemotherapy Makes Cancer Far Worse.

A team of researchers looking into why cancer cells are so resilient accidentally stumbled upon a far more important discovery.

While conducting their research, the team discovered that chemotherapy actually heavily damages healthy cells and subsequently triggers them to release a protein that sustains and fuels tumor growth. Beyond that, it even makes the tumor highly resistant to future treatment.

14) Chemotherapy Backfires – Causes Healthy Cells To Feed Growth Of Cancer Tumors

This protein,dubbed “WNT16B,” is taken up by nearby cancer cells, causing them to “grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy,” said Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He’s the co-author of the study that documented this phenomenon, published in Nature Medicine. This protein, it turns out, explains why cancer tumors grow more aggressively following chemotherapy treatments. In essence, chemotherapy turns healthy cells into WNT16B factories which churn out this “activator” chemical that accelerates cancer tumor growth.

15) Chemo and Radiation Actually Make Cancer More Malignant

The very treatments may have transformed a relatively slow growing tumor into a rapidly proliferating and invasive one.

16) Beating Cancer With Chemotherapy And Better Drugs: Junk Science?

(1) The Department of Oncology at North Sydney Cancer Centre in 2004 published a report evaluating chemotherapy over the years and concluded that ‘it only made a minor contribution to survival’. The figures they came up with were 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in America.

(2) The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle that concluded ‘Chemotherapy can cause cancer to return’. They said CAUSE – apparently chemotherapy can cause healthy cells to produce a protein WNT16B and this is taken up by cancer cells – it helps them re-grow and even protects them from the next round of chemotherapy.

(3) A ‘landmark study’ from their Cambridge Institute showed there were 10 different ‘clusters’ of breast cancer types. ‘No longer does one size fit all’ they cried.

(4) Three research studies reported on the existence of Cancer Stem Cells at the heart of tumours. A couple of UK cancer centres (Bart’s Hospital and the Blizzard Institute, London) have even isolated these nasty little cells. Apparently, if you don’t kill them off, they can re-grow. In one of the three studies (from the University of Texas South Western Medical Centre), there were statements such as ‘Cancer Stem cells are in charge of tumours’, and the lead researcher, Dr Louis Parada and the other researchers added, ‘In the past we have tried to get rid of the entire stew of cancer cells. But shrinking a tumour by 50% is irrelevant. No current drugs tackle cancer stem cells.

(5) Perhaps the final words should therefore go to Duke’s University Medical Centre in Carolina who in their 2012 report concluded that ‘Patients with cancer are largely being mislead into believing that the drug they are being offered is somehow going to cure them’.