Cancer Headlines Are Lying to You—Here's What's Really Happening

 Why “kills cancer cells in a dish” almost never becomes a real cancer treatment.

👉 Get your free guide, '10 Things to Elevate Your Chemo Journey'

👉 Want personalized attention to help you along your individual cancer journey? Explore 1:1 sessions with Dr. Chaplin

👉 Want to find out more about Dr. Chaplin's journey of bringing a cancer drug to market? Explore his innovations

--------------------------------------------
Episode Description:

You’ve probably seen headlines like this:

“Scientists discover compound that kills 99% of cancer cells.”

Sounds like a breakthrough, right?

The reality is much less exciting.

Most of these studies are done on cancer cells growing in a dish, not in real patients. And those experiments often behave very differently from what happens in the human body.

In our newest post, Dr. Chaplin explains:

• Why cancer cell lines mutate and evolve
• How famous research models have contaminated thousands of studies
• Why drug doses that work in lab dishes are often impossible in humans
• And why clinical trials matter far more than early laboratory experiments

Understanding this can save cancer patients from a lot of misleading headlines.

--------------------------------------------

Inquiries: 

info@elevatingcancertreatment.com

https://elevatingcancertreatment.com

--------------------------------------------

Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical advice. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard or read in this podcast or on this channel.
Reliance on any information provided by Dr. Jay Chaplin or Elevating Cancer Treatment is solely at your own risk. Dr. Jay Chaplin is a scientist and drug developer, not a medical doctor providing patient care. The content presented here reflects general scientific understanding and research, and may not be applicable to your individual health circumstances. Individual medical conditions and treatments vary, and no two situations are exactly alike.
Always consult with your personal healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment plan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let me tell you a secret about cancer research headlines. When you read something like Scientists Discover Compound X from algae kills 99% of cancer cells, or scientists discover light kills cancer, and the study was done on cell lines in a dish. It's almost certain it means nothing in real life. And today I want to explain why I keep saying that cell line studies aren't reliable. In hopefully an entertaining way. Because it's not that scientists are incompetent, a few of them are, but because the system itself is honestly really wild, and sometimes the stories behind it are downright ridiculous. Hello and welcome to Elevating Cancer Treatment, where we explain the science and debunk myths to help you navigate your health journey. My background is a little different. Beyond educating about cancer, I'm actually designing new drugs that are defining the future of oncology. This direct hands-on experience offers me a very different perspective of how these cancer treatments work on the body, interact with the cancer cells, and cause side effects. And these are insights that I'm excited to share with you. If that sounds interesting, make sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. And please share it if you find it useful. I'm Dr. Jay Chaplin. An important reminder, I'm a PhD, not an MD. The information in this video is education and it's not medical advice. Every cancer is unique and no general information applies to everyone. Please remember that. Always consult with your healthcare provider for guidance on your specific situation. And two quick things. First, as a thank you for being here, I've created a free resource, 10 things to elevate your chemo journey, which you can download from the link below. And second, by signing up, you'll also get updates on that innovative cancer treatment I'm working on. I'm confident it represents a significant advancement in immunotherapy. So please take a moment, download your free guide, and join us in shaping the future of cancer treatment. Cell lines are not what you think. Most people assume that the cancer cells used in laboratories are stable, reliable, and always act the same. That the breast cancer cell line or the lung cancer cell line stays basically the same forever and still acts like the tumor that they were made out of in the first place. But that's not true at all. The opposite is true. Cancer cells are already genetically unstable to begin with. And when you take them out of a person and grow them in a dish, they have to adapt and evolve to that environment. They mutate incredibly fast. Sometimes they pick up new mutations in just a few days of growing. These aren't always little tiny spot mutations either. Over time they can lose entire chromosomes. They can gain extra chromosomes. One cell line has 11 copies of a particular chromosome. They can develop totally new genetic behaviors, break and fuse different chromosomes to each other. After about five years of culture in a lab, many cancer cell lines barely resemble the original tumor they came from. The most commonly used cancer cell lines, the gilas, have been in continuous use for over 70 years. Meaning the thing researchers are studying usually doesn't remotely represent the real cancer anymore. Now, you might think, so just freeze the cells and preserve them. That's what they do, right? That was the assumption for a long time. Scientists thought that if you froze cells in liquid nitrogen, you would basically freeze them in time as well. They'd be totally stable. But it turns out even frozen cell lines can develop genomic instability over time, which means the most famous cell lines in the literature, the ones used for decades because they're the most familiar to us, they are often the least reliable models of cancer. And this is where things get hilarious. Cell lines often contaminate each other in labs. You're pipetting along from one dish to another, you accidentally forget to change the tip, oops, eh, you move on. They can literally overgrow another culture and replace it. Again, the most notorious example are those Gila cells. Those cells came from cervical cancer in 1951, and they grow so aggressively that they have invaded countless other cultures. So thousands of studies have been published with people thinking that they were analyzing liver cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and hundreds of other kinds of cancer, but they were actually studying heavily and bizarrely mutated cervical cancer cells instead. Here's another one. There was a famous breast cancer cell line called MDA435. It was used, again, in thousands of studies, and it was the gold standard for breast cancer research for over 35 years, until genetic testing revealed it wasn't breast cancer at all. It was a melanoma from a guy's butt cheek. Oops. And it gets even better. Some human cell lines were later discovered to be either entirely rat cells, that was the CDB cell line, or entirely mouse cells, that was the ACCNS cell line. Which means scientists were studying human disease on rodent cells without realizing it. Which is pretty crazy because rodent cells are significantly different than human ones. You'd think somebody would have noticed that. Hey George, why do you think our antibodies work on every cell line except for this one? Who cares? It was in our last paper, just keep using it. Even if the cell line is correct, it might be infected. Yeah, guess what? Not every bacterial infection is obvious or even curable. Yeah, you guessed it. Cell lines can be contaminated with bacteria. The worst ones are called mycoplasma, and mycoplasma can change the metabolism, the behavior, and sensitivity of cells without killing them or even providing obvious clues. Current estimates are that somewhere between 15 to 35% of all cell lines worldwide are contaminated with these bacteria, wreaking havoc on experiments. These are much more common in older cell lines, like the ones preferred by publishing academic labs, they're familiar, and shared cell lines, again, like the ones used in academic labs because you can get your buddy to ship it to you for free. While the average contamination rate is about 25%. The rate for academic labs is about double that, it's closer to 50%. Guess where all of those small and exciting sounding papers on cancer treatments in cell lines come from? Academic labs. Places where they generally don't have the resources or the infrastructure to regularly test their cell lines to prevent or contain contamination. But let's say, for sake of argument, everything is perfect. The cell line is correct, it hasn't mutated like crazy, it's not infected, the experiment is done super carefully, the drug works beautifully. It could still fail spectacularly. They usually do. One really famous example is the drug candidate TGN 1412. It looked fantastic in cell cultures. Animal studies, even in human blood samples in the lab. It looked like a great drug for treating autoimmune diseases. Everything suggested it was safe and worked well. But in the first human trial in 2006, healthy volunteers were given just a tiny bit, one 500th of the supposed minimum dose. Glad they started there. Within hours, those people developed massive cytokine storms, huge amounts of inflammation, multiple organ failure. It was the worst drug trial disaster of its time. It wasn't alone. These things happen all the time. Another example was a drug developed by Roche called Tomanarson. It was for Huntington's disease. Cell line studies again looked amazing. Animal studies looked promising. It was supposed to block the mutant Huntington protein and cure Huntington's disease. That would have been fantastic. But in phase three human trials in 2021, the study had to be stopped. Why? Because not only was the drug not helping patients, it was actually making them worse. People on the drug had worse health than on placebo. There are many examples of this where beautiful-looking cell line studies utterly failed in people. I'll put several more down in the description for your late-night entertainment and reading pleasure. So why does this happen? The core problem is simple. Even when they are representative of normal human cells, which often they aren't, but even when they are, cells in a dish are nothing like a human body. In a dish, cells grow flat on a surface. There are no blood vessels, there's no fluid flow, there's no pressure, there's no heartbeat, there's no immune system, there's no liver metabolism or kidney excretion, there's no surrounding tissues for cell-to-cell contact. And there's way too much oxygen. Your tissues operate at 1 to 5% oxygen, not the 21% of air in an incubator. All of those cell cultures are already under oxidative stress well before you do anything to them. It's just one type of cell floating in a simple and constant environment. But your body, everything interacts with everything else. Everything touches everything else. Everything supports everything else. Here's another major issue, and I've talked about it before. Drug dosing. When you swallow a pill, only a tiny amount actually reaches your bloodstream. And what does reach your bloodstream goes straight to the liver, where a lot of it probably gets broken down and eliminated. That's what we call first-pass metabolism. Very little of what you take ends up circulating throughout your body. But in cell culture studies, researchers can dump huge amounts of a compound directly onto cells, sometimes more than will even stay in solution without carriers or special solvents. Sometimes the concentrations used are literally hundreds of thousands of times higher than anything achievable in the human body, even when you dose it and deliver it by IV. Avoid the mouth entirely, you still can't get the concentrations that high. Okay, so this compound kills cancer cells. But if it only does it at doses that no human being can achieve, does it matter? One of the easiest ways to test a cancer treatment claim is simply this. Calculate whether the minimum effective dose in the study is even physically achievable in humans. I've done that several times before. I'm probably going to do it in the next episode. Very often those levels are not even close. If it's not within tenfold, there's no chance. Even if it is, there's always that question of safety. What do you mean? It says that it only killed the cancer cells. The question is, how long did they let that test run for? With publications, in many cases, the cancer cells died earlier than normal cells, but not selectively over normal cells. The test was cut short. If cancer cells die after 24 hours and normal cells die at 48, and you stop the test in the middle at 36, it looks great, but you've still damaged all these cells and they're still gonna die. So it may look great in a paper, but it doesn't mean anything in the body. And now for my favorite example. Do you know what kills 100% of cancer cells in a dish? Distilled water. Seriously, it works incredibly well. It literally bursts cancer cells open like overfilled balloons. In fact, it works so well that it's a part of bladder cancer surgery. After the surgery is done, it is standard practice for doctors to rinse the bladder with warmed distilled water to destroy any leftover cancer cells floating around, keep them from implanting and causing metastases. Normal cells survive this not because they're healthier, but only because the lining of the bladder, the urethelial barrier, is still intact around them and protects them. That actually works. Works really well. But here's the important detail. It only works when the cells are directly exposed to distilled water. If you drink a bottle of distilled water, it's not that in your bloodstream. Your blood dilutes it with salts, with electrolytes, with proteins and other cells. So that distilled water does absolutely nothing to a tumor somewhere else in your body. It won't help liver cancer. Go ahead, try it out. It kills cancer 100% after all. And that's the key lesson. Just because something kills cancer cells in a dish doesn't mean it works in a human being. It probably won't. It's nice, but don't think it means something. It's only the start, not the finish. The biology is completely different in the body. This is why headlines like dandelion root extract kills cancer cells usually come from cell line studies that never translate into real treatments. Cell cultures are really useful tools, but they're only one teeny, tiny piece of a giant and very complicated puzzle. And if we forget that, we end up believing a lot of things that sound exciting, but simply aren't true and can't be. Again, the takeaway is that cell line studies are a great and useful tool for early research, but they fail to predict what happens in in a human body. Always check whether results translate to realistic doses, real tissues, and real patients. A million cell line studies that are completely consistent and all say the same thing are not worth as much as one small clinical trial because the clinical trial is on people. And we care what happens to cancer cells in people when they're treated, not cells in a dish. That is an entirely different thing, even at its best. And most of the time, it's at its worst. Beyond these videos, if you need more personalized guidance or a deeper dive into specific treatments to have your treatment be as effective as possible, I offer one on one sessions and medical advocacy. You can find information on our website, which is linked down below. Again, if you found this video informative, please give it a thumbs up, click the notification bell, and subscribe to our channel for more science based cancer insights.