Understanding Research - X kills Cancer

in #science7 years ago

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”This new drug has been shown to kill cancer cells.”

Ah, yes, one of my favorite topics. Stuff that kills cancer. Nowadays, everything seems to kill cancer. Everything but chemotherapy. But why do people think this? An example:

Metformin reduced the clonogenic survival of FSaII mouse fibrosarcoma cells and MCF-7 human breast cancer cells in dose and time-dependent manner as shown in Fig. 1. In FSaII cells (Fig. 1A), incubation with 1.0 mM metformin for 1 h reduced the clonogenic survival of cells to 65.1%, and incubation for 24 h or 48 h reduced the survival to 49.3% and 28.7%, respectively.

Okay, what does that mean? They incubated the cells with metformin. Incubating cells usually means putting them in a flask with the chemical they’re being incubated with. The flask is closed and then we wait.

When cells were cultured in the presence of metformin in the above mentioned studies, the size of resultant colonies and the cell density in the colonies were found to be reduced as compared with the colonies formed in regular medium.

Cultured in the presence of metformin, that means they let a cell line grow with metformin present. Still only a petri dish (basically, they might be using a different container. Mammalian cells are annoying to work with).

And what is their conclusion?

Nevertheless, our results clearly indicated for the first time that metformin is potentially effective to enhance the efficacy of radiotherapy.

Note the key word potentially. But wait, how could anyone twist this into “Metformin kills cancer”? Well, look at what their caption looks like:

Metformin kills and radiosensitizes cancer cells and preferentially kills cancer stem cells

Take a journalist who needs a great headline or someone who doesn’t actually read the whole article and boom. Metformin kills cancer.

So if you read that scientists discovered some great new way of killing cancer, you should ask: How did they test it? Only on cell lines or on actually living humans? And how many humans did they test? What were the actual results?

Don’t believe something just because the headline seems to imply a specific result.


Source:

Metformin kills and radiosensitizes cancer cells and preferentially kills cancer stem cells


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We must all understand one thing, killing cancer cell on petri dish, doesn't reflect the same could happen on animals or human. Inside a living organism, a drug may act very differently.

A chemical maybe potent cancer killing agent, but may have systemic side effect on the patient.

bang bang bang!! right on spot lol

I would claim that setting the person on fire will kill their cancer as well.

Following your earlier two recommendations to test my claim, I'm pretty sure that the rate at which it works is statistically significant, but I don't think it's been peer-reviewed yet.

I peer reviewed it and repeated the experiment. It works but the mortality rate is way too high.

Hi @suesa indeed this is a nice post on the point of understanding research on X-Kills canser perhaps i must agree that X-Kills can cure canser if research is done properly and moreover instead of relying on chemotherapy alone for canser treatment since is good to try other alternatives,lastly @suesa this was a good post i really enjoyed it for sure keep posting such good content stuff here on Steemit.

Papers covering efficacy of metformin in treating cancer cells have been coming out for a while already. While you are absolutely right, to be fair in this particular case, the preclinical results were deemed convincing enough to start a number of clinical trials on metformin in treatment of breast cancer.
So far, no results are to be found published...
Only future will tell if the sloppy journalists were making false promises!

Yeah, I needed an example for my post, not making any statement about the actual effectiveness of the drug here :)

Note that a gun can kill cancer, fire can kill cancer, deadly chemicals can kill cancer... literally anything can "kill cancer."

The point is to kill cancer without harming the host (rest of the human body).

Thank you for being a sensible voice. I find it so insensitive that people out there are claiming this and that can cure cancer completely and that there's a pharma conspiracy hiding it.

Excellent post. We constantly receive information in the mode of "broken telephone". The fundamental points are in the nuances, which did not reach us, if we rely only on media, and do not study the primary sources. This applies not only to medicine and to science in General...

"Scientists have found a cure for cancer! NASA discovered a planet with organic life! Microsoft has created a quantum computer!"

But as you rightly pointed out, the key words are: potentially + theoretically and hypothetically

I'm not an expert in the medical field. However, as a student of Mass Communications, I can confidently say how todays journalists (not all), do yellow journalism to spice up things and get more response from the audience. The common majority of laymen falls prey to such journalism and starts believing it to be true and this is how rumors become 'facts' when they pass on this information to their dear and near ones. It's a blessing that we're living in an age of IT and information. However, this blessing becomes curse when people starts sharing lies/fake info with just a click of button.

@suesa, Thanks for an awesome article that discloses the true faces of fake journalists. It's a guideline for Steemit authors as well. Good job to keep the Steemit community clean.

Respect.

Steem On!

Cancer is getting shier by the day.
The last thing I heard was the Syrosingopine synergic effect with metformin (Diabetes, cancer, hypertension treatment combo breaker)
Pre-clinical trials have been promising so far, though (especially the in-vitro and in vivo animal studies in lung tissue).

Retrospective studies show improvement in survival, but they can also show the contrary, depending on who pays them.

Great works, I wish you success

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