NF-kB seems to be one of those swiss-army knife mechanisms like p53. p53 does way more than protect against cancer (along with a slew its other tumor suppressor sisters). It also effects changes in metabolism (in ways that may be complementary and designed to starve cancers). NF-kB has the same sort of metabolic effects as well as its role in preventing transformations. It could be a somewhat analogous mechanism.
We know downregulating NF-kB has been observed to reduce insulin resistance—which looks very much like what happens when you downregulate p53. Interestingly, aspirin and aspirin-like substances reduce insulin resistance in high doses when they act on NF-kB. This has been well-known since the early 1900s and forgotten over and over. Similarly, reducing p53 expression reduces insulin resistance.
If I were 1 cell trying to inhibit or starve a cancer or otherwise sick cell, I'd not express tons of insulin receptors too. The problem is when it's lots of cells. Then it's bad. Your body attempts to compensate for all the increasing expression of things like NF-kB and p53 but eventually fails.
http://mosaicscience...ls-cancer-curse has a great (or terrible) story on what defective p53 looks like. You get cancer almost 100% when that happens. Totally knocking down p53 would be a really bad idea if you did it for very long. You can do it with pifithrin-α. See http://www.pnas.org/...8/3116.full.pdf.
@corb Why does that paper you cited reference HGPS? The full paper is paywalled.
@xEva RE: "I find it unnerving that a bunch of chemicals can change cells so profoundly. What if something like this happens in vivo? Scary stuff!"
I have a theory that small molecules will do a lot of these things we want but only in the EXACT right doses. I'm seeing lots of papers on the DYRK family, for example. The windows to inhibit something are extremely small in micromoles between, say 10-20 said units. That's tiny. Too much—absolutely nothing happens. Too little—absolutely nothing happens. I've seen a bunch of examples like that, and it makes me wonder if that's why it's not happening so often. The effect falls off a cliff. This assumes your body uses similar substances to signal for itself, but that's not difficult to believe.
This stuff is all very new, and I think the power of some of these "small molecules" is surprising to everyone.
Some of them do exist in nature, which makes you wonder if small quantities of a substance could cause cancer in ways we never discover because we never test that exact concentration in a cell culture on that particular cell line.
The answer is probably—YES! And, even more weirdly, sometimes much more of that substance would be much less dangerous. That may explain so-called bad luck sometimes, too.
Edited by Logjam, 02 May 2016 - 10:44 PM.
