A promising new synergistic vitamin C treatment for Cancer

A study recently published in Nature Communications has shown a promising low toxicity intervention for treating cancer. A fasting-mimicking diet combined with vitamin C (4 g/kg intraperitoneal injection twice a day) delayed tumour progression in multiple mouse models of colorectal cancer; in some mice, it caused disease regression.

Prior research on the cancer-fighting potential of vitamin C has produced mixed results. However, recent research has been promising, showing efficacy, especially in combination with chemotherapy. The research team aimed to find out whether a fasting-mimicking diet could enhance the high-dose vitamin C tumour-fighting action by creating an environment that would be unsustainable for cancer cells but still safe for healthy cells.

Senior author, fasting and longevity researcher Valter Longo commented by stating, "Our first in vitro experiment showed remarkable effects. When used alone, fasting-mimicking diet or vitamin C alone reduced cancer cell growth and caused a minor increase in cancer cell death. But when used together, they had a dramatic effect, killing almost all cancerous cells."

Fasting has been shown to be an effective way to maintain health. Dr Valter Longo created the fasting-mimicking diet based on decades of research which includes several clinical studies. The diet lasts for 5 days and enhances your body’s natural processes of cellular clean-up which naturally gets triggered when your body is in a prolonged (3 or more days) fasting state.

Research abstract:

Fasting-mimicking diets delay tumour progression and sensitize a wide range of tumours to chemotherapy, but their therapeutic potential in combination with non-cytotoxic compounds is poorly understood. Here we show that vitamin C anticancer activity is limited by the up-regulation of the stress-inducible protein heme-oxygenase-1. The fasting-mimicking diet selectivity reverses vitamin C-induced up-regulation of heme-oxygenase-1 and ferritin in KRAS-mutant cancer cells, consequently increasing reactive iron, oxygen species, and cell death; an effect further potentiated by chemotherapy. In support of a potential role of ferritin in colorectal cancer progression, an analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas Database indicates that KRAS mutated colorectal cancer patients with low intratumor ferritin mRNA levels display longer 3- and 5-year overall survival. Collectively, our data indicate that the combination of a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C represents a promising low toxicity intervention to be tested in randomized clinical trials against colorectal cancer and possibly other KRAS mutated tumours.

References:

Di Tano, M., Raucci, F., Vernieri, C. et al. Synergistic effect of fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C against KRAS mutated cancers. Nat Commun 11, 2332 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16243-3