Brilliant presentation and brilliant+ juggling 🙂 What is your opinion on Prof Dr Thomas Seyfried's 'Metabolic Theory of Cancer' that focuses on fuel supply rather than genetics? Even though genetic mutation can cause cancer, but in most cases, it is cancer that causes the genetic mutation he suggested. Have you looked into that concept at all? Any comments? Jazak Allah khair!
Hi there, thank you for your kind words! Yes it is very interesting and based on a lot of evidence when we study the metabolism of cancer cells. With cancer I think it's like a chicken and egg situation, you never know what the first change was that caused the dysregulation. Based on what I understand, something has to be causing the dysregulated metabolism though. That's also where epigenetics can come in as an explanation, e.g. your environment or lifestyle or food could affect the metabolism in cells and the metabolism could dysregulate the DNA repair machinery. The cancer wouldn't 'cause' the mutation per se but it could lead to conditions that makes mutations more likely, for example, by dysregulation of the repair machinery and incorrect correction, or producing reactive oxygen species which are known to damage DNA and are a result of metabolic dysregulation. Hope that answers it somewhat! In a nutshell, it's confusing and very hard to pinpoint the very first change(s) that lead to cancer as we can only look at it once it's all happened.
I feel there's a bit of misunderstanding on Knudson's two-hit hypothesis. From what I understood, it is a hypothesis that most tumours will be triggered when genes in both alleles are mutated (either inactivated tumour suppressors or activated tumour promoters). Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Hey you're right, thanks for pointing out! What I was trying to explain was that just two mutations (in different genes) can be sufficient to drive tumorigenesis. Misuse of the term, apologies!
