In cancer research, there are a multitude of reasons why a compound may look promising for use in a cancer drug. Passionate and caring people put countless hours into looking for new ways to disrupt the biological processes of cancer cells that won’t harm healthy cell development. Theory after theory must be tested and then move from paper arguments into the laboratory. The first step in the lab will be along the lines of testing a culture of human cancer cells in a little petri dish under a microscope. Then, if that step is successful, growing tumors on mice to see if those can also be effectively killed off while leaving the mice unharmed. And yet, for still another multitude of reasons, successfully killing cancer in a dish or on mice does not mean that substance is an effective cure for human cancer.

Here is a brief explanation of why.

The human body is a complex mechanism, much more complex than a mouse and certainly more complex than a small glass dish with some agar in it. Because of this complexity, very specific requirements come into play for developing a therapy that will be successful. This is because there needs to be a means for delivering the drug directly to the cancer in a high enough dose to be effective without being toxic. This delivery process is, perhaps, the single biggest reason that most “promising” cures never make it to the all-important clinical trial stage.

To begin with, we should cite the fact that it is relatively easy to kill cells in a petri dish. The fact of a such an experiment being effective is often held up as gospel in articles promoting potential cures as “proof” of their effectiveness. Done right, with sound theories behind why the chemical in question ought to work and with proper peer review of the work, such success may well indicate that the research should continue on mice. But in no way should research that does not advance from a dish experiment be construed as a cover-up of the next big thing! Unless there is ample reason to assume that the substance can be safely synthesizes to work in a safe dose with live tissue, it can join the thousands or millions of other studies that kill cancer cells but will never make it into the treatment of human cancer patients, like, for example, bleach or meat tenderizer.

Speaking of meat tenderizer, let us move onto mice. Typically, human cancer cells will be used to grow tumors on the outside of a set of mice. These can then be directly injected with a high level of whatever compound is being tested in a relatively pure form. And then the mice are monitored to see whether the tumors die off without affecting the individual mice. Not surprisingly, they often do. This is because the mice are being treated like walking petri dishes. It is a necessary step, because the cancer is then feeding off a more complex biological source than the goo in yummy agar, but it still does not show a proper delivery technique to get the therapy into a human body safely. And this is where my favorite meat tenderizer analogy comes into play.

One of the many studies that never progressed past mice and into clinical trials garnered a ton of conspiracy theories about why it was not being embraced after showing it could work on (virtually) any type of cancer cell. It doesn’t matter which chemical it was, because the story is the same for so many. But there was a relatively substantial outcry from laypeople and a few scientists who wanted more funding to continue the experiments, particularly because the chemical in question was particularly inexpensive and readily available. Naturally this meant that it would be squashed by Big Pharma because no drug company could patent it for huge profits.

Only here is the first glitch: the substance only worked in doses so high that, according to the assessment of one prominent researcher, meat tenderizer would have accomplished the same thing. Soaking an external tumor in a dissolving agent will certainly kill it without potentially harming the mouse underneath. But that does nothing to show how it will work inside a human body. And the second nail in the Big Pharma conspiracy idea is this: all these substances need a delivery mechanism, and such mechanisms are patentable and profitable if they work — in fact, a real cure would be more valuable to a pharmaceutical company than anything else.

Not ironically, this very substance, in spite of being so cheap and easy to obtain, has already gotten several patent on it, including for potential delivery mechanisms. This destroys the conspiracy theories surrounding it. Some alternative clinics tout it as a cure, particularly when combined with chemotherapy, but such applications have still not been shown in legitimate studies to actually work — all that really has been indicated is that the substance is relatively non-toxic to humans in small doses. Ultimately, it has not progressed to human trials for a very basic reason: non-replicable results and a lack of an effective means to get the substance to the cancer cells without first being destroyed, passed through or absorbed by the body. Until such complex issues can be worked out, the substance is essentially useless for human treatment. Moreover, relying on it is potentially dangerous.

So, scientific papers showing that a POTENTIAL cure is being studied, that effectively kills cancer cells in a dish or tumors on a mouse, does not equate to a discovered cure for cancer. Even a single success story or anecdotal mention of human subjects is not enough, because there are many, many reasons why one person or another might show improvements after virtually any therapy and often in conjunction with multiple therapies. Moreover, extended research is essential with human bodies to indicate long term effects. Anecdotal evidence is particularly unconvincing because it is generally uncontrolled and unreliable scientifically. Virtually all alternative treatments appear based on anecdotal rather than scientific evidence — if they had a scientific basis and actually worked, after all, they would be embraced as medicine.

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