That atavistic cancer hypothesis is actually fueling the work of quacks: Orac has been getting threats from a Frank Arguello, who runs a crank cancer mill called “Atavistic Chemotherapy”.
It’s amazing stuff. It goes on and on about how cancer represents a reversion to the old cell types of single-celled organisms, and how modern chemotherapy is useless and dangerous, so he has a better formula: safe, harmless, and revolutionary. You’ll never guess what it is.
He’s treating cancer patients with antibiotics.
The drugs used in combination have been selected based on the principles of “Atavistic Metamorphosis” published by Dr. Arguello in 2011, and after years of testing them in hopeless cancer patients. They fall in the pharmaceutical group of anti-bacterial (antibiotics), anti-fungal and anti-protozoal (anti-parasitic) drugs. Anti-viral drugs have also a place within the principles of Atavistic Chemotherapy because viruses preceded cells in their origin, and they were the precursors of the first cells on this planet. However, costs and toxicity of antiviral drugs have forced us to use them only when other approaches fail.
Because of delays in obtaining patents, the actual names of the medicines given in Atavistic Chemotherapy are not revealed to the patient. All of the drugs employed have expired patents since being in the market for decades. However, we are in the process of filing for patent protection for “New Use” or “New Formulation,” in order to protect the intellectual property and credit for this work. Although the drugs we use have been around for many years, Atavistic Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy is a new type of cancer treatment.
That’s totally insane. Modern antibiotics (and especially the older ones; new targets are being actively explored now) primarily target three bacterial processes: the ribosome, because prokaryotic ribosomes have significant differences from eukaryotic ribosomes, enzymes involved in bacterial cell wall synthesis, because we eukaryotes don’t have them, and certain specific enzymes involved in DNA replication that are not present in us. These are derived features of prokaryotes — even if cancer were atavistic (and I say it isn’t), a human cancer is not going to suddenly start making prokaryotic ribosomes, bacterial cell walls, or replicating circular DNA strands with the aid of a prokaryotic enzyme.
These are drugs that have been selected specifically for their potency against prokaryotes and their inability to affect eukaryotic cells. They can’t do anything against a human cancer, because human cells do not make the proteins that the drugs bind.
In the absence of any information about the anti-parasitic and anti-fungal agents, it’s hard to say what they do — but in general, drugs like that are selected for their minimal effects on the cell types of the subject, and the specificity of their action on cells of organisms of different phyla. Cancer cells are still human cells. They don’t become fungi or myxozoans or platyhelminths. These are all drugs that won’t do anything for the patients.
I am shocked that this snake oil salesman is in business — but I guess that’s why he’s based in Los Cabos, Mexico — to avoid regulation and criminal charges. That and the nice beaches.
It sounds like the answer is no, but I’ll ask anyway. My understanding is that in the human body human cells are outnumbered by something like 10 to 1 by bacterial cells. Are there any kinds of cancer that result from uncontrolled replication of those bacterial cells?
No.
Hurrah, that is a step above treating cancer with baking soda.
Definitely a step way way way above treating cancer with prayer.
Are there any kinds of cancer that result from uncontrolled replication of those bacterial cells?
The closest I can think of to this situation is MALT lymphomas which are associated with H pylori and can, occasionally, regress with full treatment of H pylori (not just random antibiotics, but very specific treatment with antibiotics and adjuvants…and even then it only works sometimes.)
To be fair, viruses are fairly frequently involved in carcinogenesis and treatment of some of them (i.e. HIV) can be helpful in the treatment of cancer. But antivirals alone are rarely, if ever, enough to cause regression.
Wondering if this guy has “just enough knowledge to be dangerous” syndrome.
I’d hope this ass never got any patients, but thinking back to the laetrile clinics in Mexico, I’m sure he’ll be happily wracking up bodies in no time.
@jacobbasson
Generally, no. As I understand it (and I don’t have the credentials to back this up, just an interest in the science), cancer can be induced by some viruses, and can be stimulated to develop under conditions of chronic inflammation (which a bacterial infection can contribute to). In addition, the bacteria in our gut has a modulating affect on our immune systems that is still being investigated.
The big problem with over-applying antibiotics is that under normal conditions most of these bacteria exist symbiotically with us, and provide beneficial functions. A number of the more common metabolic diseases in our culture today may be linked to our repeatedly killing off these bacteria with antibiotics, resulting in little diversity in our guts and on our skin. There is a lot of ongoing research on this relationship with our internal biome.
Environmental factors can induce cancers, but treating the causes after the cancer is present is closing the barn door after all the horses have escaped.
@PZ:
I wasn’t saying otherwise, just trying to answer jacobbasson’s question about if bacteria can cause cancers.
the fuck
You beat me to it. Did he get the RNA-world hypothesis wrong or I’m a to charitable here?
He got everything wrong.
You’d have a better shot treating cancer with bacteria than antibiotics!
(there are case reports of tumours regressing after bad infections – and there’s actually a non-ridiculous potential mechanism – the infection stimulates an immune response that reverses the systemic immune suppression that nearly all malignant cancers produce, which protects them from host immunity.)
@9 ChasCPeterson
My thoughts exactly.
So he’s not even not even wrong.
(not even)² Wrong.
(Well, the grammar seems Ok, and there’s no “quantum“…)
There may be some point to closing the barn door to prevent other horses from escaping, i.e. people who have a survivable lung cancer are encouraged to stop smoking already to prevent a second primary from forming. And a few horses can be lured back into the barn, i.e. KS can sometimes respond to HAART therapy alone. But in most circumstances expecting relief of the inciting environmental factor alone to cure the cancer is futile.
I’m always fascinated by two things (well, more than two, but still) – quacks, and the internal biome. This quack is fucking up people’s internal biome.
I am outraged. I am sure he will be suing Orac and anyone else his lawyers can get their hands on.
Quacks can always afford lawyers, and I wonder what sort of vile person sees them and goes “yes, I will take your money to prevent people from warning others about your dangerous BS.”
Hmmm….so cancer is a step backwards according to this quack. Well drinking lots of beer makes a person act less intelligent i.e. de-evolving higher consciousness. So perhaps we could put these two together and get a person really drunk most of the time to help the drugs work better? Mix the drugs with alcohol as a potent cocktail?
From the Quack’s Website, the very first sentence of the write up.
By giving your money to me, instead!
The fact this guy’s opening sentence discussed the immense profitability of the cancer treatment industry is very telling.
Ack! Blockquote fail. Sorry.
Try taking some antibiotics. I hear they can fix anything.
;-)
Yes, it is and has been for the past 100 years, at least. Common diseases are profitable because a lot of people get them. But treatable common diseases are far more profitable than untreatable common diseases and cures are even better. Hence, drug companies have, in their desire to profit from cancer care*, spent amounts of money that would make the Pentagon turn pale in order to find treatments and/or cures. With some success, I might add. Compare 5-year survival rates now with even a decade ago. There’s no miracle cure(TM) it’s true, but there never will be. Cancer isn’t a single disease. It’s a bunch of diseases with one common symptom.
Nope. Cancer care has changed almost beyond recognition in the past few decades, with quite a lot of the change coming in the past few years. What hasn’t changed is quacks. Quacks are still offering the same old BS non-treatment. And people are still dying because of it. That hasn’t changed and it won’t. Because, see point one: cancer is profitable.
*Well, desire to profit and desire to show off how much smarter they are than everyone else. And because cancer is the horror movie of medicine: you just can’t look away once you start looking, even when you know what’s about to happen with the chainsaw.
@dianne #4:
I’m not wondering.
Part of the trouble with trying to educate so these quacks can’t fool people is that the average person, presented with numbers that show changes over time, glaze over. They can’t get an emotional reaction to a number. They can’t make the leap that, say, when I was 20, people did not survive Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Now, even if you get diagnosed late your 5 year survival rate (which usually means cured) is about 85%. That is a lot of families who didn’t lose a loved one. But all the common people can see is that people still die of cancer.
Ran into that like a brick wall a couple of years ago. One of my best friends mentioned that he was going to the doctor because he has a swollen lymph node that had been that way for a couple of months. I said, “Does it hurt?” and he said, no, and I felt a little sick. He was diagnosed with a sarcoma. It had metastasized to his liver and spine but the lesions there were small and the doctors told him he was going to have a lousy year and then he would be fine.
He tolerated the chemo and radiation remarkably well. Unfortunately, so did the sarcoma. More tumors developed, including a big one behind his eye and a couple in his lungs and brain. He died about 18 months after he was diagnosed. Damn, I miss him. And people around me kept saying, “See, the doctors don’t know what they are doing,” and in my grief I raged, “Tell that to Laura, and Shirley, and Joan, and Megan, the four women I can think of off the top of my head that I know personally who have survived breast cancer, you idiots”. Well I didn’t actually say it like that, but I admit to getting very frustrated with some of the talk surrounding my friend’s death. He had no such illusions. He knew he had developed an unusually aggressive and toxin-resistance cancer that was just plain bad luck. DAMN I miss him.
Sorry. I don’t do Vulcan.
@otrame: I’m sorry about your friend. Cancer still sucks, despite the progress made so far.
Just a fair warning. This guy is highly annoying and persistent. He also appears to Google himself and the term “atavistic chemotherapy” rather regularly. It would not surprise me in the least to see him show up here or to hear that he’s sending complaints and legal threats to PZ’s university. I’m not really worried; he’s just more of an annoyance than any real threat.
*looks in mirror*
atavistic chemotherapy
atavistic chemotherapy
atavistic chemotherapy
otrame
*hugs*
cancer sucks
*sharpens titanium fang*
I agree with you on the latter point (that eukaryotic cells no longer can make “prokaryotic ribosomes, bacterial cell walls, or… circular DNA strands”), but I think the last thing (circular DNA) is probably basal unless Eukaryotes did not evolve from either Archaebacteria or Eubacteria (as implied or explicitly stated by, eg, most of the papers in this post and its associated comment thread), and possibly even then: It may be that linear chromosomes are too complicated to evolve all at once and that circular DNA was a necessary intermediate. Also, if Eukaryotes descended from either Eu- or Archaebacteria, then their simpler ribosomes are almost definitely basal and those of Eukaryotes derived from them.
And I cited sources (admittedly I was told in that thread that they represent a “minority view”) suggesting that the root of the tree of life is within or beside Chlorobacteria, essentially implying that all three characters are basal.
And this has to do with cancer how? Citation needed….
The type I topoisomerases in pro- and eukaryotes are significantly different from one another and don’t show any significant homology, which is the point. Cancer doesn’t turn a eukaryotic topoisomerase into a prokaryotic topoisomerase which is vulnerable to antibiotics.
say there even WAS support for this model; that circular DNA was a stepping stone.
it’s entirely irrelevant to this idiotic concept of cancer as “revertive”; the associated enzymes and machinery to produce circular DNA in a eukaryote just isn’t there any more, period.
it’s not even barking up the wrong tree; it’s more like mistaking a rock for a tree to begin with.
Cancer research hasn’t changed?
Twenty years ago, the current front-line drugs for renal cell carcinoma didn’t exist. Ten years ago they were experimental. Now they’re the front-line drugs – and look like they’re about to be supplanted by another set of drugs that didn’t exist ten years ago, which are in the experimental phases now.
The difference for my husband is that 20 years ago, he would have had no options but a pretty desperate surgery. Ten years ago, he would have had an experimental holding action (which has proved reasonably effective). This year, he has an experimental shot at an actual remission, with a back-up of proven holding action. This is not a minor difference to him, or to any kidney cancer patient.
Well, I can add that a patent in the US is unlikely. New use is not a good enough reason for a known anything (medicine, toy, funnel, whathaveyou) to get a new patent.
That’s just not how patents work.
Oh, I should add that they can apply, and thus put “patent pending” on their snake oil all they want. The probability of actually being successful in *obtaining* a patent is very low.
(IANAL, but I do work with patents)
The trouble with enforcing use patents on drugs is that the FDA essentially allows physicians to prescribe any approved drug, even for an off approval use. Then it is up to the patent holders to enforce their patent. Which is problematic, at best, once the drug is generic.
I never said it did. Perhaps I was a little unclear about it. I was more concerned with the use of the term ‘derived’. Perhaps I was being too pedantic, but I thought it was being used incorrectly.
I never said that it was relevant to the concept. In fact, I specifically said
Perhaps I should have added emphasis to make it more clear, but I literally said that “eukaryotic cells no longer can make… circular DNA strands”.
The term ‘derived’ literally means . It explicitly does not imply that the derived trait is more advanced. Likewise, the term basal does not imply that atavism is possible. For instance, flight is a basal trait in Columbidae; flightlessness is a derived trait in Raphus cucullatus and Pezophaps solitaria.
And as for this paragraph
First, you forgot to capitalise the first letter.
Second, the origin of linear chromosomes is certainly the subject of discussion, eg, this Bioessays paper.
Third, this “model” is not as implausible as you make it sound, even if I no longer believe that it is plausible to assume that it is the only possible model.
Linear chromosomes evolved somehow (excluding claims that it was aliens or time travellers or someone like that, which rightly require extraordinary evidence).
Evolution happens through incremental changes (“stepping stone[s]” as you put it) or through mechanistically plausible saltation, eg, changing from having four identical body segments to having five of them (again, stepping stones) (does HGT count as incremental or saltational, or does it depend on whether you are considering genes or organisms?).
Circular chromosomes are known to exist and, I think, are normal rather than the exception in Eubacteria and Archaebacteria, both of which are proposed ancestors to Eukaryotes.
It is mechanistically possible for circular DNA strands to be turned into linear ones.
Also, I just learned this afternoon that there are bacteria with linear chromosomes. I think it implies at least weakly that linear chromosomes can be derived from circular ones (or vice versa), and more strongly that the state of having linear chromosomes is derivable from the state of having circular ones (or vice versa):
Admittedly, that there are also linear plasmids does make it less likely that circular chromosomes are a necessary stepping stone to linear ones.
@32:
It does not. It was about what I thought was the incorrect use of the term ‘derived’. As for the claim itself, the paper is open access at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1586193/
Note that only if life is rooted within Eubacteria are all three characters implied to be basal.
Really? this was your point?
*headdesk*
do note that NONE of the organisms you list with circular DNA are actually eukaryotes.
do you understand why nothing you then said is relevant to the issue at hand?
do you?
because if your only point was “derived”, your point is inane.
…fuck me, but you have aptly nymed yourself, that much appears clear.
Circular DNA does not run into the shortening problem with repeated replications, and therefore do not need telomeres.
Evolving straight chromosomes from circular ones may be as simple as a jumping gene infestation that produces a double strand break at any point in the circular chromosome.
There is no reason to think that linear chromosomes in eukaryotes began in any way as an adaptive feature.
Cancer is not a single disease, but many.
@40:
I admit that my first post (@31) should probably have been a one-liner, and my second post was almost certainly far too long and in-depth. But where else was I supposed to point out the error if not in the post’s thread.
Also, you forgot to capitalise the first letter again. In all but one paragraph (or possibly two).
@40, addendum to comment 43:
Just to be clear: Myers was talking about prokaryote ribosomes, prokaryote telomerase I, antibiotics only effective against bacteria, et cetera, and I assumed that the context was all life known to exist, not just eukaryotes.
You forgot this is an American blog, not UK?
Well, to be fair, the prokaryotic origin of mitochondrial ribosome is sometimes listed as one of the reasons behind the toxicity of some antibiotics. Not to defend th B-S atavistic ‘therapy’. Just nitpicking.
you mean, just to be irrelevant.
potayto, potahto
Just for the record: most eukaryotic cells actually do contain ‘prokaryotic’ ribosomes. They are found in mitochondria and are essential for the synthesis of proteins encoded by the mitochondrial DNA. Some antibiotics that are known to inhibit prokaryotic translation also adversely affect mitochondrial ribosome function. One example is the broad spectrum antibiotic chloramphenicol. Toxic side effects of this compound are directly related to the inhibition of mitochondrial translation.
In my opinion, any criminal that want to make profit, by exploring the weakness and despair of cancer victims and their families, should be punished severely by the authorities.
What sad excuses of human beings, how can they act this way? They must be among the most despicable people in the world.
This kind of situations is so painful to me to watch, specially because i lost my maternal grandmother and a very good friend (also a excellent father and caring husband, and one of the most honest people i ever had the pleasure to call friend) because of this terrible disease. This thing affects me so much, that even after so many years im shedding tears when remembering both.
Would the antifungals help at all? I’ve heard of some truly horrible fungal diseases and have to wonder if any yeast or other myco-whatsits can induce or live in cancer. I also heard of a tumor once that was cut open and turned out to be a solid mass of fungus inside, though that sounds quackish to me…