Unlocking the Cure for Cancer through Homeostasis Regulation

[Elaine Sokolov]

Everyone knows that cancer is caused by the failure of homeostasis. So, the way to cure cancer would be to fix the failure. So, how could we do that? Homeostasis is your ability to regularly stimulate extracting bodily fluids (sweating) and keeping your body temperature the same. If maybe your regulation to maintain your body temperature was interrupted, what if we could fix that? How? I'm thinking maybe that if we could possibly do some experiments (that don't include animals/humans, if that's possible) to possibly find a cure. In order to re-regulate your body temperature, you would have to have surgery (obviously) but it might not take as long. The normal Chemotherapy could possibly eliminated if we managed to figure it out. I'd like to think that we can. I've been studying up on this for a while now, and I'm hoping in the future we can accomplish this.

 

[BillTre]

One could interpret cancer as a failure of homeostasis, if one considers the body's mechanisms for controlling the proper place and growth control of various cell types as homeostatic. However, many people might avoid that term since cancer is pretty different from normal physiological controls. If you want to call cancer homeostasis, then you would have to include several non-physiological processes in your definition.

The failures in cancerous cells include: cellular growth control, wandering of cells around the body where they are not normally found, illicit promotion of vascularization, and avoidance of immune system surveillance. These traits can be acquired in a step-wise manner as the cancer cells acquire more mutations, as it evolves greater virulence.

Among other things, cures may include: removal or directed killing of the cancer cells (including activating the immune system to attack the cancer cells), limiting vascularization of tumors, toxic treatments that are more toxic to the cancer than the patient.

You can probably not reform cancer cells. You might suppress them, but current technology is not going to make them genetically normal again (without some new breakthrough).

 

[Ygggdrasil]

As far as I know, failure of the regulation of body temperature is not known to contribute to cancer.

Most scientists who study cancer (including me) view the molecular basis of cancer as the activation of oncogenes (that drive unregulated cell growth and migration) and the inactivation of tumor suppressor genes (that protect the cell against DNA damage and regulate cell division). For a brief discussion of how these changes come about, see my Insight article on the topic: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/causes-cancer-bad-luck-bad-lifestyles/

For a very comprehensive discussion of the molecular basis of cancer, I would suggest the following two review articles:
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(00)81683-9
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(11)00127-9

 

[Elaine Sokolov]

One could interpret cancer as a failure of homeostasis, if one considers the body's mechanisms for controlling the proper place and growth control of various cell types as homeostatic. However, many people might avoid that term since cancer is pretty different from normal physiological controls. If you want to call cancer homeostasis, then you would have to include several non-physiological processes in your definition.

The failures in cancerous cells include: cellular growth control, wandering of cells around the body where they are not normally found, illicit promotion of vascularization, and avoidance of immune system surveillance. These traits can be acquired in a step-wise manner as the cancer cells acquire more mutations, as it evolves greater virulence.

Among other things, cures may include: removal or directed killing of the cancer cells (including activating the immune system to attack the cancer cells), limiting vascularization of tumors, toxic treatments that are more toxic to the cancer than the patient.

You can probably not reform cancer cells. You might suppress them, but current technology is not going to make them genetically normal again (without some new breakthrough).

But is there a way to regulate cell growth? What if we could find a way to somehow stimulate the immune system so that they attack cancer cells when detected? I don't specifically study cancer and cancer cells, but I've kind of gotten to thinking about it.

 

[BillTre]

What if we could find a way to somehow stimulate the immune system so that they attack cancer cells when detected?

This is a popular approach.