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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jason Fung
Read between
December 4 - December 13, 2022
Natural selection favors certain genes for survival. Growth, immortality, movement, glycolysis (the Warburg effect)—those cells that don’t adapt and dust off the old survival playbook don’t survive. The cancerous transformation has just been made.
PROGRESSION
The human body uses three main nutrient-sensing pathways, insulin, mTOR, and AMPK, which also act as growth factors. When the body senses more available nutrients (high insulin, mTOR, and low AMPK), conditions favor growth, which favors cancer cells. The lung cancer is now not just surviving, but also finding good soil to grow. But it’s getting a little too big and unwieldy—time to leave home.
METASTASIS
CANCER PARADIGMS
The evolutionary/ecological model of cancer, with tumoral evolution and self-seeding, reflects the complex, dynamic, and ever-evolving ecosystem of cancer. It considers not only the cancer cell itself but also its relationship with other cells and with its environment.
Population dynamics, evolution, and selection pressure are key elements of this new model of cancer. The evolutionary model is a m...
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Cancer paradigm 1.0 understood cancer purely as a disease of excessive, uncontrolled growth.
Cancer paradigm 2.0 explained that accumulated genetic mutations caused excessive growth.
As with its predecessor, cancer paradigm 2.0 (the genetic model) failed because it neglected to explain why. Why were cells mutating? With no answer, this cancer paradigm reached its limits by the early 2000s.
A NEW DAWN
This led us finally to the current evolutionary/ecological theory of cancer: cancer paradigm 3.0. Darwinian evolution is the only known force in the biological universe that can create and coordinate the sheer number of mutations needed for cancer.
Cancer is not only a seed problem but also a soil problem.
Evolutionary biology links carcinogenesis, progression, and metastasis, whereas genetics considers them all as separate issues.
This idea is not new; it just needed to be rediscovered. “Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars,” wrote cancer researcher D. W. Smithers in 1962.
Under certain conditions, such as high insulin levels, cancer will thrive, while under other conditions, it will fail to establish itself.
This new understanding of cancer has major implications for cancer prevention and treatment. An entire new front on the war on cancer has now been opened.
