To eat or not to eat with Metformin during cancer therapy?
Author: Sture Hobro
The authors of this article made a pioneering discovery! My compliments to the authors of: Combination of Hypoglycemia and Metformin Impairs Tumor Metabolic Plasticity and Growth by Modulating the PP2A-GSK3β-MCL-1 Axis (cell.com)
Results: They had five groups of mice: the first three groups were Vehicle, Metformin, and Fed/Fast group, where the latter mimicked intermittent fasting. In this setup, they had no impact on the cancer cell growth. But then they had two more groups where they introduced metformin with intermittent fasting.
Still, when the rat got metformin on eating days, they got no results. Basically, the results are the average of the Metformin and Fed/Fast group. But then magic happens when Fast and Metformin are combined and delivered simultaneously, and the cancer cells die.
For us, this result is important and shows that short-time exposure of low glucose together with Metformin could be extremely helpful. We have suggested a similar set up based on blood dialysis for other traditional cancer therapies such as Radio, Chemo, and Immune therapies together with our Therapeutic Hypo-glycemia. Radio and immune therapies work over a longer time, and the need for simultaneously delivering those therapies together with Therapeutic Hypo-glycemia may be limited. For chemo, which typically has quite a short half-life, the need to deliver both therapeutic hypoglycemia and chemo together may be more important. A new opportunity is to combine Therapeutic Hypoglycemia with Metformin to accomplish the below. Once again, our congratulations to the authors for their good work and ingenious experimental setup.
A tempting clinical study to conduct, considering the study results above, is to combine therapeutic hypoglycemia induced by dialysis with Metformin.
Figure taken from figure 1C-1E of above article.
Then a Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all my followers!
