Eating less and periodic fasting is good for health

Almost all cultures in the world have been insisting on eating less and observing periodic fasting for religious regions but now a group of scientists have confirmed in the laboratory that it is good practice with health benefits:

Scientists at University of Southern California observed that the fasting mimicking diet promotes the growth of new beta cells in the pancreas that are responsible for producing insulin which leads to reduction in the symptoms of type 1 and type 2 diabetes in mice. Some of this phenomenon was observed in human beta cells growing in petri-dish as well.

"Cycles of a fasting-mimicking diet and a normal diet essentially reprogrammed non-insulin-producing cells into insulin-producing cells," said Dr. Valter Longo, who is director of the Longevity Institute at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Dr. Longo, further said - "By activating the regeneration of pancreatic cells, we were able to rescue mice from late-stage type 1 and type 2 diabetes. We also reactivated insulin production in human pancreatic cells from type 1 diabetes patients."

"These findings warrant a larger FDA trial on the use of the fasting-mimicking diet to treat human diabetes patients to help them produce normal levels of insulin while improving insulin function," Dr. Longo said. "Hopefully, people with diabetes could one day be treated with an FDA-approved fasting-mimicking diet for a few days each month and gain control over their insulin production and blood sugar."

However, this study does not mean that patients with diabetes should start trying fasting mimicking diet without any clinical supervision. This study is still in early stages and your doctor will tell you whether or not FDA, and if yes, when will start any clinical trial. Dr. Logo warned the patients: "In regard to our recent studies on diabetes, DO NOT try to apply any type of fasting mimicking diet (FMD) to treat either type 1 or type 2 diabetes either on your own or with the help of a doctor. The combination of the FMD and insulin or other drugs could increase the risk of severe complications, including the possibility of death. Although the use of the FMD to treat either type 1 or 2 diabetes is promising, it must be tested and proven safe and effective for human use in FDA-approved clinical trials."

http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30130-7?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867417301307%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

A perspective on "Critics assail India's attempt to ‘validate’ folk remedy"

Following is a letter written by me in response to a report published in reputed journal Science which appeared online just last week:

In my opinion, brouhaha against scientific validation efforts by the government of India for the potential medicinal use of panchagavya, a mixture made of cow urine, dung, milk, yogurt, and clarified butter, based on the ancient Indian medical literature, is unfounded (1). It’s not unwise to explore the therapeutic potential of folk remedies using the modern scientific methodologies given most synthetic drugs used in the modern medicine have associated severe side effects and often times do not provide any significant health benefit at all. There are many instances when properly designed scientific studies to explore an active ingredient derived from a natural source used in the folk medicine have resulted in wonder drugs that saved millions of lives worldwide. Most recent such example is story of Artemisinin which was extracted from Chinese herb Artemisia annua, also known as sweet wormwood, which was further studied elaborately using tools of modern science by Dr. Youyou Tu who later was awarded with Nobel Prize just a couple years ago. The results obtained after decades long research program initiated at the behest of China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing was a paradigm shift in the medical field that allowed for Artemisinin to be both clinically studied and produced on industrial scale.

Author of this letter himself is involved in a collaborative project in which a big team of researchers is studying anti-cancer effects of a small molecule namely 'Minnelide' which is a water soluble derivative of triptolide, a diterpene triepoxide extracted from the Chinese plant Trypterygium wilfordii (2). Minnelide has shown a lot of promise as a potential chemotherapeutic options in multiple tumor cell lines (3) and currently being tested in clinics in a phase II, international open label trial in patients with refractory pancreatic cancer (4).

However, forcing a group of scientists some of whom may not have faith in drug discovery program originating from traditional medicine may not be fruitful in long run. There ought to be a balance between political and pure scientific influence in making decisions about science policy. An overall strategy for making decisions regarding government funded research need to be formulated with the consensus of government funding agencies as well as scientists likely to work on the projects of increased and decreased areas of emphasis as decided by government. Utmost importance should be given to allocate the budget adequate enough so as to serve both national interests and to foster a world-class scientific and technical enterprise. To this end, political and scientific administration need to establish a dialogue process that could help engage scientists who naturally have academic interests in pursuing folk medicine based drug discovery research.

References:

(1) S. Kumar, Critics assail India’s attempt to “validate” folk remedy. Science 355, 898–898 (2017)

(2) R. Chugh, V. Sangwan, S. P. Patil, V. Dudeja, R. K. Dawra, S. Banerjee, R. J. Schumacher, B. R. Blazar, G. I. Georg, S. M. Vickers, A. K. Saluja, A preclinical evaluation of Minnelide as a therapeutic agent against pancreatic cancer. Sci. Transl. Med. 4, 156ra139 (2012)

(3) Giri B, Banerjee B, George J, Modi S, Gupta VK, Singh MK, Dudeja V, Saluja AK. Triptolide pro-drug decreases tumor burden and halts tumor progression in a murine model of acute myeloid leukemia. Cancer Res, 76 (Supplement), 3499 (2016)

(4) https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03117920Show Less

Competing Interests: None declared.

Weblink to my letter: 

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/898/tab-e-letters

Omics! Omics!: NGS Saves A Young Life

Omics! Omics!: NGS Saves A Young Life: One of the most electrifying talks at AGBT this year was given by Joe DeRisi of UCSF, who gave a brief intro on the difficulty of diagnosin...

Particle beam cancer therapy: The promise and challenges

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140303143251.htm

For some patients with advanced breast cancer, chemo may be enough and they can be spared from the ordeal of going through surgery and radiation

It’s not been much time when Angelina Jolie initiated a “to go for or not to go for mastectomy” debate after being found with mutation in one of those ‘breast cancer risk prone gene BRCA1’. Well before you decide to go under a knife of surgeon, this could be a worth considering study that just came up from a very experienced physician based in India, which you want to discuss with your team of doctors.  

In a very prestigious AACR meeting currently ongoing in San Antonio, namely “2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 10–14” Dr. Rajendra Badwe from Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India raised many eyebrows when he presented his findings in which he and his team led a study of 350 women with widely spread breast cancers that had shrunk after initial chemotherapy. Almost 50% of these patients went through mastectomy (surgery to remove the breast or the lump plus any cancerous lymph nodes). Rest of them did not have surgery. After about two years, 40 % of both groups were alive, suggesting that just chemotherapy could be enough. Women diagnosed with advanced breast cancer who respond well to chemotherapy get no additional benefit from having surgery and radiation afterwards. However, Dr. Rajendra Badwe, went on saying that options for surgery and radiation can be reserved for patients who need it for palliative reasons.

http://www.aacr.org/home/public--media/aacr-press-releases.aspx?d=3236&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_content=newsrelease&utm_campaign=2013sabcs

Targeting a specific area of the body for surgery or radiation is called loco-regional treatment, or LRT. Conventional wisdom has been that women with advanced (Stage 4) breast cancer, in which the disease has metastasized (spread to other organs), are treated only with chemotherapy unless other health issues (among them the relief of pain or other symptoms; the prevention of bone fractures; the tumor causing an open wound) dictate otherwise. In last decade, however, research community divided on into two school of thought on whether or not to use other supplementary treatment modalities such as surgery and radiation so they realized severe need of trials to confirm their theories. To find which of the two treatment methods resulted in the best survival outcomes for patients, Badwe and his colleagues in India, conducted a prospective, randomized, controlled trial funded by Badwe's hospital and the Department of Atomic Energy Clinical Trial Center in India.

Between 2005 and 2013 the researchers enrolled 350 women with metastatic breast cancer whose tumor responded positively to six cycles of chemotherapy. One group of patients received LRT, while the other group did not receive LRT. Both groups were matched for age, tumor size and extent of the metastases, and hormone receptor and HER2 receptor status.

Patients in the LRT group had either a lumpectomy or mastectomy and surgical removal of lymph nodes, followed by radiation treatment. All patients whose breast cancers were hormone-related received standard hormone therapy, regardless of the group to which they had been assigned.While the cancer was well-controlled in women who underwent surgery, that didn't translate into a survival advantage over the women who did not have surgery, Badwe said.The researchers also found a 7 percent excess death rate in patients who received LRT. The finding was not statistically significant, they said, but it aligned with the previous such findings that suggest surgical removal of the primary tumor in patients with advanced breast cancer might trigger the metastases.

“From a clinical practice point of view, as a surgeon I might know when to operate,” Dr. Badwe said. “But most importantly, when not to operate is equally important. “We need to know what the tumor is sensitive to,” Badwe said. “That is of greater value than loco-regional treatment.”

The extra expense of surgery and radiation, and the impact of those treatments on a patient’s quality of life also contribute to the researchers’ position that LRT should be done only within the tenets of clinical trials, he said.

While given the genetic differences between various populations, findings from this study have to be analyzed in that perspective, however, these findings open the door for more research on this aspect and warrant for more efforts towards new targeted therapies. 

Silence please! New siRNA data provides powerful free tool for biomedical research community !

A great example of public-private scientific collaboration between the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and Life Technologies Corporation, we all now have access to a plethora of   information about how turning off a gene in laboratory by small interfering RNAs (which in my opinion is one of the most powerful tool used in the first decade of 21st Century biomedical research),  one at a time, could help us figure out their exact functions and learn more about how our health is affected when those functions are disrupted. Here is what NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins has to say about this collaborative project outcomes: 

http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2013/12/11/sirnas-small-molecules-that-pack-a-big-punch/#more-2362 

Silence please! New siRNA data provides powerful free tool for biomedical research

Wonderful work by researchers from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and Life Technologies Corporation, researchers...

http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2013/12/11/sirnas-small-molecules-that-pack-a-big-punch/#more-2362