I wrote about Eliot Rosen and his work with oxygen for cancer therapy about a year ago. I thought at the time that his concept had great merit. Of course, cancer was not among my specialties, but… (Off topic. I just looked up Eliot Rosen and found he is now a board certified oncologist on the staff of Georgetown University. Glad to see he stuck with his love.)

Well, Drs. S. Hatfield, J. Kjaergaard, D. Lukashev, B. Belikoff, R. Abbot, S. Sethumadhavan, P. Philbrook, K. Ko, R. Cannici, M. Thayer, A. Ohta, (leaders) Edwin Jackson and Michail Sitkovsky (all from Northeastern University, Boston), T. Schreiber, E. Podack (both of the University of Miami), and S. Rodig and J. Kutock (Brigham and Women’s of Harvard University) published some of their research findings in Science Translational Medicine (2015). The article, Immunological mechanisms of the antitumor effects of supplemental oxygenation, amplifies what Eliot was trying to prove.

It turns out tumors are pretty smart- they develop techniques to thwart the actions of our immune systems. Before these tumors are organized- these natural processes work and  the the immune system wins out.

As the tumors grow quickly, they outgrow the ability of our body to supply oxygen to those cells (because the blood vessels can’t be produced quickly enough).  As such, the general environment becomes anoxic (low in oxygen). This anoxic condition triggers the tumor to produce adenosine- which renders our immune system sort of moot. Adenosine causes our T cells and the other tumor destroying agents in our immune system to remain dormant.

Our policy up to now has been to develop drugs that block this adenosine effect. It may be because the American Cancer Society claims that augmenting the body’s oxygen level may be dangerous; that it could lead to hydrogen peroxide or ozone illnesses (or even patient death). But,  that’s not how Drs. Jackson and Sitkovsky considered the situation. They also wondered what would happen if they supplied more oxygen to the region. Would that strip away the tumors ability to trigger adenosine production?.

Using mice and oxygen enriched atmospheres (60% and not the 20-21% normal levels), they went about testing this hypothesis. Lo and behold, the extra oxygen that reached the normal cells let them overcome the adenosine effect and attack the tumors.  (Actually, supplemental oxygen therapy weakened the tumor- protecting the adenosine receptor and waking up the T cells that could invade the lung tumors in the mice.)

If the researchers also injected extra T cells (as well as the just supplementing the oxygen levels), then the results were even greater. Furthermore, when the researchers used mice that were genetically engineered to lack the vital T cells, augmented oxygen had no effect on tumor destruction.

(By the way, drinking coffee keeps us awake because it prevents that A2A adenosine receptor in our brain from putting us to sleep!)

This may help us treat more cancer- and remove it as the second largest killer of humans (after heart disease). Let’s see what happens when we try this concept in humans.

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