Linus Pauling is probably smiling while he is looking down upon us from above. High-dose vitamin C as treatment for cancer was one of the most controversial suggestions he was known for, and not only made him many enemies in the medical world, it also partially tarnished his reputation as a Nobel Prize laureate. He is also considered the father of so-called orthomolecular medicine, which is still derided by mainstream medicine as pseudo-scientific and false. Of course, as most of my readers know by now, whatever is labelled “controversial” by mainstream medicine often turns out to be true/right. Despite mocking vitamin C treatment for cancer, without much fanfare certain pharma companies have developed drugs based on vitamin C, with perhaps the most successful to date being the drug Apatone (a combination of vitamin C and vitamin K). Apatone has already been allowed by the FDA to be used on cancer patients including on people with advanced/terminal prostate cancer. So, it is becoming more and more obvious Dr. Linus was right, and just as importantly, the bioenergetic theory of cancer is also right. The study below on pancreatic cancer proposes that vitamin C works by generations hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), which works through the same cytotoxic mechanism as traditional chemotherapy. In other words, medicine reluctantly admits that vitamin C works, but counters any attacks against its approach by claiming that vitamin C is simply another form of cytotoxic chemotherapy. As such, it is used not as a primary treatment, but as an add-on therapy which just increases the potency of traditional chemotherapy. However, if one looks at the published studies on Apatone, a completely different mechanism is proposed – a bioenergetic one. Namely, when vitamin C is combined with an oxidizing agent – vitamin K (as in the drug formulation) or any other quinone-like molecule such as methylene blue, CoQ10, emodin, the tetracycline antibiotics, etc – it gets oxidized to something known as dehydroascorbic acid (DHAA), which itself is a powerful oxidizing agent. Since the vitamin C molecule is structurally very similar to sugar/glucose, it is preferentially uptaken by cancer cells through the same pathways as glucose (e.g. the GLUT proteins), as cancer cells are known to have much higher glucose affinity compared to non-cancer cells. In fact, it is this preferential uptake of glucose by cancer cells that is used both for cancer diagnosis (imaging with radioactive glucose) and has led medicine to keep claiming that cancer is “addicted” to sugar and that carbohydrate restriction, keto diets, fasting, etc should treat cancer. All such approaches have been tried, with disastrous results, as after a brief pause in growth, the cancer becomes highly aggressive and invariably lethal. The bioenergetic theory states that cancer cells uptake more glucose from the blood because they are functionally deficient in glucose. Namely, the glucose that enters cancer cells gets “wasted” by conversion into lactate, due to the cancer cells’ highly reductive state (e.g. low mitochondrial NAD+/NADH ratio) instead of being combusted through OXPHOS. So, the solution would be to provide more glucose, not less. Be that as it may, the Apatone approach is to use a molecule (vitamin C) that uses the same uptake/transport mechanisms as glucose, which results in its preferential accumulation inside cancer cells, and once inside the cancer cell this oxidized form of vitamin C (DHAA) corrects the reductive excess of cancer cells, and after some time they start to respire normally. In other words, Apatone works by converting “cancer” cells back into “normal” cells by gradually changing the redox state of such cells from high reduced to highly oxidized. Why the quotes? Well, it should be clear by now that there is no such thing as a “cancer” cell and a “normal” cells. There is only a continuous spectrum of metabolic health with “cancer” at one end and “health” at the other, with the cell moving back and forth along that spectrum, entirely based on its environmental influences (no mutations needed). However, in order for that process to work the reduced form of vitamin C, which is the one most commonly sold as a supplement, needs to be co-administered with an oxidizing agent (vitamin K, in the case of Apatone) so that DHAA is formed, as DHAA is the true therapeutic agent. Another option is to administer pre-formed DHAA, but that molecule is not very stable and quickly degrades or converts back into the reduced form. Unfortunately, the study below used high amounts of the reduced form of vitamin C (ascorbate) and as such drastically limited its therapeutic potential. While high doses of ascorbate will still raise DHAA formed inside the body, the effects are rather minute compared to administering either preformed DHAA or a combination of vitamin C and a quinone. One can see the vast difference that by comparing the effects of Apatone with the effects seen in the study below. Namely, Apatone as a daily oral dose of just 5g vitamin C (plus 50mg vitamin K) almost completely prevented mortality in patients with end-stage prostate cancer, while a massive 32g daily dose of vitamin C (and by IV route too) merely doubled survival time in patients with pancreatic cancer. Oh well, I guess it is a step in the right direction and it may be just Big Pharma’s nefarious way to slowly switch over to the metabolic treatment of cancer without admitting culpability along the way. Something similar is already happening with the SSRI industry. Now that is becoming painfully obvious that low serotonin is not the cause of depression and, in fact, high serotonin may be the cause, Big Pharma has started to release SSRI drugs that have substantial anti-serotonin effect at the receptor level. So, such drugs may very well work, but Big Pharma gets to publicly save its theory that SSRI drugs are good and so is serotonin, while implementing the exact opposite hypothesis pharmacologically. In 5-10 years, SSRI drugs will quietly get dropped as “obsolete” and nobody will even think of asking the question of why they were even used in the first place, and how many people were harmed/killed by them. It will be a “paradigm shift” as the good ol’ science philosopher Mr. Kuhn said, which is really just a euphemism for “the jig is up, time to find a new one”.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.redox.2024.103375
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11-high-dose-iv-vitamin-chemotherapy.html
“…Results from a randomized, phase 2 clinical trial show that adding high-dose, intravenous (IV) vitamin C to chemotherapy doubles the overall survival of patients with late-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer from eight months to 16 months….The findings, published in Redox Biology, mark another success for high-dose, intravenous vitamin C, which has overcome many hurdles in the almost 20 years UI researchers have persevered to demonstrate its benefit for cancer patients. “We’ve had ups and downs, of course, but this is a culmination of a lot of people’s hard work,” says Cullen, who is also a member of UI Health Care Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. “It’s really a positive thing for patients and for the University of Iowa….”Not only does it increase overall survival, but the patients seem to feel better with the treatment,” Cullen says. “They have fewer side effects, and appear to be able to tolerate more treatment, and we’ve seen that in other trials, too.”
