Free Republic

Researchers begin noting that the efficacy of coadjuvant molecules, in the landscape of cancer treatments, remains a focus of attention for clinical research with the aim of reducing toxicity and achieving better outcomes. The researchers state, "Most of the pathogenetic processes causing tumor development, neoplastic progression, aging, and increased toxicity involve inflammation." Inflammatory mechanisms can progress through a variety of molecular patterns. As is well known, the aging process is determined by pathological pathways very similar and often parallel to those that cause cancer development. Among these complex mechanisms, inflammation is currently much studied and is often referred to in...

Three hours after Dr. Todd Mitchell’s Dec. 3 flight from Beijing landed in San Francisco, a call demanded his immediate attention. Mitchell, 59, had spent two-and-a-half weeks in China, which has the most mushroom poisoning deaths in the world, sharing the treatment method he developed at Dominican Hospital. The call concerned a Santa Rosa hospital patient believed to have eaten deadly mushrooms. Principal investigator of an amatoxin mushroom poisoning clinical trial that has treated nearly 100 patients across North America in the past 10 years, Mitchell arranged for the patient’s overnight transfer to Dominican Hospital. This patient was the first...

Tissue with wound-like conditions allows tumors to grow and spread. In mouse lung cancer cells, treatment with silibinin, a major component of milk thistle, removed the molecular billboards that signal these wound-like conditions and so stopped the spread of these lung cancers, according to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Carcinogenesis. Though the natural extract has been used for more than 2,000 years, mostly to treat disorders of the liver and gallbladder, this is one of the first carefully controlled and reported studies to find benefit. Here is how it works:Basically, in a cell there can be a...

Silibinin, a drug derived from milk thistle, destroys lung cancer in mice, investigators at the University of Colorado, Denver report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Lead investigator Dr. Rana P. Singh told Reuters Health, "We have been studying milk thistle components, silymarin and silibinin, to examine their efficacy and mechanisms against different...cancers for over a decade." In the current study, Singh's team injected mice with a chemical called urethane to induce lung cancer. The animals then received diets containing different doses of silibinin. "We obtained pure silibinin from Sigma Chemical Co., and silibinin diets were commercially prepared...