Tag Archive for: leukemia

Is Taurine Safe?

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The title said, “Could your energy drink be fueling cancer?”

“Now what?!” was my first thought. Researchers reported in a press release that the amino acid taurine may help cancerous cells make energy to fuel their growth. Because taurine is found in energy drinks and protein supplements, I wanted to check whether this is something to be concerned about or not.

This was a complex study from the perspective of identifying what were the potential stimulators of tumor progression in bone marrow. A taurine carrier was identified. The researchers conducted tests which added taurine to specific types of leukemia cells to determine tumor progression. They concluded that further research was necessary to find something that would block taurine carriers from carrying taurine into tumor calls where they could stimulate the production of energy via glycolysis. That may be correct or not.

The methods section of the paper was over five single-spaced pages long; that doesn’t make it bad, but each unique test has to have a standard error of the method. In other words, how specific and precise does the method measure the variable?

  • Using available leukemia cell lines is a first step to test theories, but we don’t know if that’s how it would work in living human beings.
  • They did testing on rodents, but there were only a few rodents in each group.
  • On top of that, taurine is naturally produced in the body, and they specifically identified tumor sites as one of the locations where taurine is produced. How can that be differentiated from natural production and supplementation?

In my opinion, they were far too aggressive in their conclusions about energy drinks potentially fueling cancer. For now, the most conservative approach is that if you have an aggressive myeloid leukemia, consider reducing taurine intake from all sources, which would also include meats, dairy, and eggs. There’s a lot more research that has to be done before we definitively know how this information impacts the real world.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. https://scitechdaily.com/could-your-energy-drink-be-feeding-cancer-what-scientists-just-discovered/
2. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09018-7

What Research Delays Can Cost

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In 1911, a physician named Peyton Rous discovered that a microbe, found in a tumor in chicken, was able to infect other chickens causing the same cancer. His findings were thought to be ridiculous because cancer wasn’t caused by a microbe—so his research stopped. Those microbes were called viruses in later years.

Move forward to the 1950s, when a scientist named Ludwig Gross picked up the research and established that viruses caused cancer in several species of animals. What he did not prove was how that was possible. The problem was that it went against the central dogma: DNA could result in the production of RNA, but RNA could not go backward and interfere with DNA. Without knowing how that could happen, it wasn’t possible to establish that viruses caused cancer in humans.

In the early 1970s, David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco, and Howard Temin discovered a piece of the virus that could retroactively insert itself into the cell DNA and make it a cancer cell. They called that reverse transcriptase, and it led to the term retroviruses. In 1975, the researchers won Nobel Prizes for that discovery.

Now the science turned to finding a retrovirus in humans. Robert Gallo discovered just such a retrovirus in two different humans and submitted his paper to the Journal of Virology. It was rejected on September 15, 1980.

During the early 1980s, there was a disease that seemed to be impacting primarily gay men; at that time, catching the virus was almost always a death sentence. Dr. Gallo turned his attention to this new virus and co-discovered what became known as the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV for short, the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency disorder, also known as AIDS. That was in 1984—four years after Gallo demonstrated that a retrovirus caused a form of blood cancer, leukemia, in humans.

Those lost years delayed the test for HIV, also discovered by Gallo. By 1995, there was a blend of drugs that could arrest HIV and today, while there is no vaccine yet, HIV is blocked by drugs that stops it from replicating itself.

Four years were lost because science stopped. More correctly stated, science didn’t stop, but those scientists who would have been attracted to the research problem didn’t take up the search because there was limited funding for that type of research. Ryan White, a teenage hemophiliac from Indiana, died on April 8, 1990, from AIDS. If you don’t remember him, you may remember Freddie Mercury who died of AIDS on November 11, 1991. Maybe they would have lived if science hadn’t slowed for four years, as would hundreds of thousands of others.

And imagine how far ahead we might be if 114 years ago, scientists had admitted they didn’t know everything and followed up on the research by Dr. Rous. How many lives could have been saved? What major diseases could have been cured?

That’s the price for delaying research. But what about research that is started based on the dogma of the person who dictates where research dollars are spent? I’ll cover that on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Revisionist History. Malcolm Gladwell. The Obscure Virus Club provided the basis for the HIV and AIDS timeline. Every scientific article and fact were independently verified by the Memo writer.

How Vitamin C Can Stop Leukemia

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Three recent studies related to cancer diagnosis and treatment, including alternative treatments, contain solid, meaningful research. That’s this week’s focus.

The first study was published in the journal Cell. The title is the best way to describe the paper: “Vitamin C May Encourage Blood Cancer Stem Cells to Die.” The biochemistry in this paper is complicated, but here are the main points. In some forms of leukemia, there are genetic mutations which prevent cancer stem cells from maturing and dying. These stem cells should naturally die, but the mutation aids production of an enzyme that causes the stem cell to mature.

In a study on mice engineered to have that same mutation, researchers found that an infusion of vitamin C caused the cancer stem cells with the mutation to be turned on, producing the enzyme and causing the cancer stem cells to die. That keeps the bone marrow healthy as they produce all types of blood cells.

This is fascinating research but it’s just an initial phase; it doesn’t apply to every form of leukemia or every type of cancer. But this is the type of research that may result in better treatments in the future.

I know many of you have seen the headline on vitamin B6 and B12 and lung cancer; I have the paper and am reviewing it. I’ll write about it next week, so don’t throw out your B vitamins or energy drinks just yet.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

 

Reference: Cell, DOI: 10.1026/j.cell.2017.07.032.