• Combination Vitamin C And Anti-Cancer Drug Works Better In Animal Study

    Posted November 28, 2012: by Bill Sardi

    Since the 1970s when Drs. Linus Pauling and Ewan Cameron first utilized intravenous vitamin C to prolong the survival of cancer patients by four-fold, a war has ensued between modern medicine and vitamin C advocates.  Mayo Clinic doctors set out to disprove Pauling and employed single-dose oral vitamin C which did not reach sufficient blood concentrations to transiently produce hydrogen peroxide to selectively kill cancer cells.  Finally, 28 year later, National Institutes of Health researchers conceded that intravenous vitamin C does indeed kill cancer cells.  More recently Drs. Hilary Roberts and Steve Hickey of Manchester, England conclusively showed that even oral doses of vitamin C if taken at frequent intervals could achieve concentrations that can kill cancer cells.

    Now researchers report that not only are the toxic effects of the anti-cancer drug Taxol are countered by simultaneous use of vitamin C but that Taxol actually kills more cancer cells when vitamin C and Taxol are employed together.  Just when this combination therapy might begin to be used in cancer clinics is unknown.  ©2012 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.

    Nutrition Research 2012 Nov;32(11):873-83.

    Ascorbic acid alleviates toxicity of paclitaxel without interfering with the anticancer efficacy in mice.

    Source

    Department of Biomedical Science, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, Seoul, South Korea; Department of Anatomy and Cell Death Disease Research Center, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea, Seoul, South Korea.

    Abstract

    Paclitaxel is used extensively as a chemotherapeutic agent against a broad range of tumors but often leads to the early termination of treatment due to severe toxic side effects. In this study, we hypothesized that ascorbic acid could reduce the toxic side effects without interfering with the anticancer effect of paclitaxel. To demonstrate this, we examined the effect of the combinational treatment of ascorbic acid and paclitaxel using H1299 (a non-small cell lung cancer cell line) and BALB/c mice implanted with or without sarcoma 180 cancer cells. In H1299 cells, the anticancer effects of the combinational treatment with paclitaxel and ascorbic acid were up to 1.7-foldhigher than those of single-agent paclitaxel treatment. In addition, it was shown that the viability of the HEL299 normal cells was up to 1.6-fold higher with the combinational treatment than with paclitaxel treatment alone. In vivo mouse experiments also showed that mice co-treated with paclitaxel and ascorbic acid did not exhibit the typical side effects induced by paclitaxel, such as a reduction in the numbers of white blood cells and red blood cells and the level of hemoglobin (P < .05). The analysis of cancer-related gene expression by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and immunohistochemistry revealed that the combinational treatment suppressed cancer cell multiplication. Taken together, these results suggest that combinational chemotherapy with ascorbic acid and paclitaxel not only does not block the anticancer effects of paclitaxel but also alleviates the cytotoxicity of paclitaxel in vivo and in vitro.  PMID:23176798

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