A few weeks ago, my dad, my son and I had the opportunity to visit Professor Thomas Seyfried and his research team at Boston College.
We've interviewed Prof. Seyfried before, and we've spent a lot of time on The Moss Report exploring the metabolic theory of cancer. But this was different. We were actually in the lab, surrounded by the people doing the research, talking about what I believe is one of the most important questions in cancer today: What if we've been looking at the disease backwards?
For decades, cancer research has been dominated by the idea that cancer is fundamentally a genetic disease, caused by mutations in the DNA. Seyfried and his colleagues believe the problem begins earlier, with damaged mitochondrial energy metabolism, and that many of the mutations we associate with cancer come later.
If they're right, that's a very big deal.
It changes the question from simply which mutations are driving this cancer? to what is fueling these cells, and can we exploit the metabolic differences between cancer cells and healthy cells?
That's where glucose and glutamine come in, along with nutritional ketosis, the glucose-ketone index (GKI), glutamine inhibitors such as DON, repurposed drugs, and what Seyfried calls the "press-pulse" approach to cancer treatment.
We covered all of that during our visit. But some of my favorite parts of the conversation came when we pulled back from the individual therapies and talked about the bigger picture.
My dad, who has watched cancer theories and treatments come and go for more than 50 years, called the somatic mutation theory a "dead duck." Tom talked about what evidence it would take to prove his own theory wrong. And before long we were talking about Warburg, Copernicus, Galileo, scientific revolutions, and what happens when an established way of understanding the world begins to give way to something new.
I don't know how quickly this revolution will happen, or exactly where it will lead. There is still a tremendous amount of work to be done, particularly in bringing these ideas out of the laboratory and into well-designed human clinical trials.
But standing there in that relatively small laboratory at Boston College, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were at the heart of something very important.
The full article with transcript and scientific references is available at The Moss Report website here: https://www.themossreport.com/rethinking-cancer-inside-thomas-seyfrieds-lab/
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