Lactic acid strongly increases cancer risk (as well as the hypoxia that produces it), which is why muscle tissue evolved a high resistance to cancer. Hence, it should have a solid mechanism / system of mechanisms for this resistance.
Some cancers like colon are preventable, but cancer is still the leading non-preventable cause of death in the future. I consider WILT viable, but far far away. In between I see no substantial, groundbreaking and generic anti-cancer approaches.
Understanding and mimicking the evolved muscle tissue gene expression and cancer prevention mechanisms might be a powerful method of beating >95% of cancers as leading cause of death. (Ref: see bottom).
I only know of two sources, and would greatly appreciate if you can help me find more. If we can gather more material on this, perhaps I could help turning this into a SENS/MFoundation literature review.
1. http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/7393016
Med Hypotheses. 1980 Feb;6(2):133-7.Click here to read Links
Possible reasons for the high resistance of muscle to cancer.
Seely S.
Muscle, particularly striated muscle, is highly resistant both to primary and to metastatic cancer. This resistivity is thought to be connected with the lactic acid producing activities of tumors. Lactic acid is an anoxia signal in the body, to which blood vessels tend to respond with a sprouting reaction, new vessels seeking out the source of anoxia and vascularising it. The reaction of the body to incipient cancer is probably two-fold. Fibroblasts treat them as foreign bodies and attempt to encapsulate them, while blood vessels tend to perpetuate them by supplying them with nutrients. The fate of the tumor may be decided by the relative speed of the two reactions. Muscles are lactic acid producers themselves, hence their blood vessels must be conditioned to a greater tolerance of it than in other tissues. This may be the crucial factor in preventing incipient tumors from establishing themselves in muscle.
PMID: 7393016 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
2. A young researcher named Eva Vertes has picked up this topic. Mentioned in her TED talk at 06:00 or so: http://www.ted.com/i...f_medicine.html
Reference: there are two basic types of muscle cancer (Ref: wikipedia article: Soft_tissue_cancer), which are both very, very rare (<1% of all cancers):
Leiomyosarcoma occurs in 5-10% of soft tissue sarcomas, which are in themselves rare cancers. Ref: http://sarcomahelp.o...myosarcoma.html
Rhabdomyosarcoma accounts for 4% of all sarcomas (again, which are rare themselves), and most of it are childhood cancers. Ref: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/meid:69867
Edited by mixter, 14 May 2009 - 08:50 AM.