Healthy vs Cancer cells during CancerDialysis
Author: Sture Hobro
When healthy cells shift to ketone bodies as fuel for energy production it is linked to reduced oxidative stress. Firstly, the need to utilize NAD+ (another substance that can reduce ROS) to produce acetyl-CoA when ketone bodies are used to feed the Krebs Cycle is reduced compared with that when using glycolysis. Secondly, healthy cells can reduce the ROS produced in the mitochondria from ATP production, by increased uncoupling in the electron chain transfer.
Cancer is often addicted to glucose and use it both for proliferation and survival. Moreover, cancer cells can’t utilize ketones effectively for energy production due to their mitochondrial dysfunction. Also, ketones act as a broad HDAC inhibitor at millimolar concentrations easily achieved during CancerDialysis. Reducing the overexpression of HDAC seen in most cancers will improve the therapeutic efficacy of other cancer therapies. One example is the strong suppression of apoptosis (e.g., reducing cancer cells’ immortality) mediated by HDACs, which will be reduced through the inhibitory effects of ketones and will open an opportunity to kill cancer cells during CancerDialysis.
The ketogenic condition reduces the availability of glucose and ketogenic condition/diet is shown to increase cancers vulnerability to other anti-cancer treatments.
These differences between how healthy cells and cancer cells react to ketogenic condition act as a metabolic wedge during CancerDialysis, where oxidative stress is reduced in healthy cells while it is affecting cancer cells negatively in numerous ways.
We suggest that reducing glucose and glutamine with CancerDialysis and at the same time increase ketones in the blood will work as an adjuvant treatment to other cancer treatment. Likely this would stress cancer cells and at the same time reduce the impact on healthy cells from other cancer therapies.
Figure A shows the pleiotropic effect of CancerDialysis on cancer and healthy cells, and B depicts the metabolic wedge that creates a healthy environment (a starvation-like condition) that healthy human cells have learned to cope with over millennia, which may be fatal for cancer cells that have developed during our lifetime during normal metabolic conditions.
