Salk Institute discovers that Serine improves diabetic neuropathy

 Supplementation with amino acid serine eases neuropathy in diabetic mice

 

"Foods naturally rich in serine include soybeans, nuts, eggs, chickpeas, lentils, meat, and fish, and serine supplements are inexpensive and available over the counter."

Lysine and (+) Catechin disable melanoma cells from establishing metastases

 (+)-Catechin in a 1:2 Complex with Lysine Inhibits Cancer Cell Migration and Metastatic Take in Mice

 

10uM preincubation for 6 hours before inoculation into the mice.  This is different from establishing a xenograft and administering catechin:lysine orally.  They openly state that the anti-metastatic activity is independent of a lack of cytotoxic effect, attributed to EGCG, but not catechin. 

 

 

Then one would ask, is 5-10uM Catechin achievable in the blood?   Yes.  Is 5-10uM lysine achievable in blood?  Yes.

One could imagine a solid tumor, when constantly bathed in this complex in a live mammal, would encounter this effect described.  

 

The next step would be to administer this complex by IV catheter and in an oral formulation in mice with established solid malignancy and check for met burden in non-hormone driven malignancy.  I guess that hormone driven malignancies will not respond, but non-hormone driven maligancies will be contained.

Is there any evidence whatsoever that dietary L-Lysine is helpful against atherosclerosis? Yes, but

It was not until 2014, until a group in Japan studied a kidney disease related calcification disorder of the arteries.  It wouldn't be scientific to conflate this discovery to any other etiologies or use this for a cross claim where there was no evidence, although it recommends that L-Lysine be studied in atherosclerosis arrived through various pathologies.  A novel MOA, not considered before is the suppression of iPTH.  Very profound.  Importantly, they do not claim it reverts pre-existing calcification, and that this is an open question.  

The General Electric Lysine-Sepharose column for Lipoprotein(a) purification relies on the lysine binding sites (LBS) of apo(a) to capture it before eluting it with stronger affinity lysine analogs.  The study was never done in rodents to see if lysine could dislodge Lp(a) deposits in atherosclerotic plaque.  There certainly was ample time and resources available to do so and it remains an open question.

Dietary l-Lysine Prevents Arterial Calcification in Adenine-Induced Uremic Rats

 

 

Vitamin C and Cancer - The Research Isn't Finished.

New evidence shows very different mechanisms of action than that expounded about, such as pro-oxidant and antioxidant effects, pro-drug effects, immune side effects, tumor side effects, stromal effects, epithelial to mesenchyme transition effects, and useful fibrosis.  The last mechanism, reliant on dense collagen meshes from the "schirrous response" or foreign body response is the same an oyster does to a grain of sand, except instead of pearl, the human body uses collagen.  Sometimes, the tumor turns into a fibrous, benign cyst.  Other times, the stroma prevents TIL from approaching it.  Certainly, when a tumor is free to break away from the primary, it makes for more metastases, which is what makes cancer so lethal.  No doubt the capsule buys more time, even with a very vascularized tumor.  Pauling noted a new compound made, between ascorbic acid and the cements between cells that inhibits hyaluronidase, which dissolves the cement and allows tumor cells to spread.  This enzymatic inhibitor was called a physiological hyaluronidase inhibitor, PHI.

"It now seems clear that the active component of PHI is a tetrasaccharide with a terminal glucuronic acid unit replaced by an ascorbate residue, resistant to exoglycosidase activity, and therefore capable of blocking the whole process of glycosaminoglycan depolymerization." Cameron, et. al 1979

There was no compelling body of work since then to prove or disprove the in situ generation of such a PHI around tumors that required vitamin C to be made.  As in zero papers since then.

In 2023, epigenetic reprogramming, a reset mechanism, was discovered.  This isn't ammunition for the loony bin and death bed burglars of Linus Pauling to scream in vindication.  Hardly so, for this discovery isn't theirs and they claimed all sorts of outlandish buffoon thoughts.

 Vitamin C boosts DNA demethylation in TET2 germline mutation carriers

Copper Deficiency Can Cause Heart Failure

Here is some good science out of the British Medical Journal that will spare a lot of good people from a lot of bad grief, mysteriously caused by a simple lack of dietary copper.

Copper deficiency may be a leading cause of ischaemic heart disease 

 

 

Ethics in Medicine

If our primary goal is to improve the human condition, then propagating suffering is the antithesis to it.  Any behavior that breeds more harm against the oath, "Thou shall do no harm," demonstrates an active flaunting of the ideals of medicine.  A self knighted "Health Foundation" must first actually refrain from harming hundreds of people before seeking out to deploy antique empires in far off places with a favorable international exchange rate where a peanut at home is a pound afar.

It is not a psychiatric playground to ruin yourself and everyone around you in a pyrrhic loss, not even a pyrrhic victory.  You leave that psychological baggage at the doorstep before you enter the hallowed halls of medicine.

It is not a place of judgement and social engineering.  This is not a wooden puppet theater.  This is why there are such explicit protections for belief, orientation, physical traits, gender, etc.  It applies to everyone, not just someone who thinks they are the prince or princess of the building.  I would privately joke about people carrying such fruity airs of faux royalty by prefacing their name with "King" _so and so__/  Even real royals, one who actually visited me from overseas, are not so self-absorbed.  Medicine is meant to heal ailments of the body and mind, not create more of them.

It is not a place to put your ego above the life and death reality of your words.  If you insist on erroneous ideas such as opposing the covid-19 vaccination campaign that has more or less restored normalcy to American life, what you do is indirectly mass murder people by encouraging vaccine denial, thereby allowing the covid-19 virus to be so much more severe and dangerous.  The vaccine turns a once deadly new plague into something like an old cold or flu.  Nobody is going to lug around the mountains of herbs and pints of oils with them all the time in case they catch covid-19.  It is simply more practical to upgrade everyone's immune system to be effective towards covid-19 all the time, without need for reactive herbal extracts which fresh supply you must have on standby at all times - great business model.  Moreover, those magic elixirs factually have not been tested in humans with covid-19 for effectiveness, patent or no patent.  The right to access over the counter herbs, vitamins, minerals, and natural supplements should exist and be maintained as a uniquely American right towards personal health, but these materials should not be construed as a cure without testing them as one first.  To suggest that a patent replaces a clinical trial fools nobody of importance or influence in legal medicine.

It is our place as scientists and those involved in the science to treat it with the utmost sense of responsibility it deserves.  Although the day to day should not be treated like a constant emergency, but with the appropriate amount of urgency or even calm, the fact is that we are dealing with the matters of life and death for some.  It is not a joke for people who have cancer, heart disease, brain ailments, or permanent infections.  It is not a joke for those who have been cosmetically disabled by a disease.  It is not a joke for those whose body is crumbling from underneath their mind long before natural old age.  It is not a game, and for those who abuse and have abused the channels of science as merely a game should read over this from the beginning to the end a few times.

Novo Nordisk models 2 Time Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling's Discovery Between Collagen And Human Atherosclerosis

From the groping in the dark to connecting genes to diseases, Linus Pauling brought the world greater clarity and visibility in biological science.  He was a very intuitive character, pulling things out of the blue which were often correct.  One of his conjectures was that the human collagen synthesis pathway and the lack of the most critical element to this, ascorbate (pronounce it how you will, it is always spelled ascorbate) somehow was the driving force for the majority of human atherosclerosis developed over decades in a lifetime.  Rather than being a sudden, overnight phenomenon where a lump suddenly appears and you keel over from an LAD plaque burst, thrombotic, ischemic "widow maker," these bumps in the artery form over the period of years.  You can even suffer a bunch of these over weeks, and they still won't kill you outright.  Likewise, you don't need any unstable bumps on your arteries for a pothole in the endothelium to cause the same thrombus event by revealing a platelet sticky, damaged basement membrane.

Linus Pauling, being an expert on helical things, found that collagen, a helical thing, is the basis for healthy arteries.  Old histopathology stains are not able to reveal the medial and subendothelial compartment collagens, and so for many decades, many pathologists considered collagen unimportant to arterial integrity until it was glaringly obvious in a fibrotic scar of a plaque.  The Trichromes and Elastin Van Gieson stains in particular generally only detect the adventitial collagen and nothing inside.  The EVG stain suggests that there is perpendicular collagen between the SMC cells, but does not mark the subendothelial collagen.  Where's the collagen???  It is definitely there.  The strongest collagen jacket of an artery is the adventitial layer, so when you have problems there, the artery is in deep trouble.  Some dismiss the adventitia, the collagen jacket of arteries as unimportant to the etiology of atherosclerosis, but when you consider that arteries themselves are fed by arterioles entering and fed through the adventitia, the collagenous adventitia presents itself as essential to the the inner lining health of the artery.  Very simply, all the collagen in an artery is important to its health.  Later immunohistochemistry and EM IHC would clearly show that collagen is a critical structural element in every layer of the human artery.  

Even fibrosis, which is the human body's way of filling in voids of dead and missing cells with a neutral element, rather than leave a giant hole through which massive inappropriate leaks occur, is a life perpetuating phenomenon for the artery and all organs in the body.  A defective, non-functional, excess collagen patch is exceedingly more beneficial than a hemorrhage or even worse, thrombosis hole, in the mathematics of the automatic human biology.  Very imperfect, but also perfect given that sometimes cells cannot divide fast enough to replace a massive loss of them.  

So which one of the many collagens is so important to arterial health, and which is the intersection between Linus Pauling's vitamin C-arterial collagen-arterial health idea?  Col4, which like all collagens requires vitamin C for its integrity.

Novo Nordisk identifies the specific collagen subtype preservation and restoration needed to prevent atherosclerosis (Col4)

Specifically, Linus Pauling cited the amounts of ascorbate that Gulono-y-lactone-oxidase carrying vertebrates are able to upregulate in times of stress that virtually never succumb from heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, and the rest at the half point in their lifespan.  In these vertebrates, it is totally unheard of for an animal at the equivalent of a human 65 years old to suffer a heart attack, even considering their massive overbearing genetic excess of HDL over LDL.  Eventually, the lack of heart cell regeneration may give way to natural fibrosis and a natural lifespan end, where the heart gives out, but this is not the result of obstructive dietary cholesterol but an innate evolutionary clock.

But there must be a reason for the relative excessive ratio of LDL over HDL in the human organism.  Sri Lankan elephants for example, seem to only have HDL, and are huge vertebrate mammals.  It suggests that an overbearing ratio of LDL to HDL is tantamount to intellectual evolution, pointing to the criticality of cholesterol to the brain at the expense of arterial health.  A true conundrum presents itself, considering that the brain needs its arteries.  A very strange "what if" presents where the insulation upon axons is not cholesterol, but an artery friendly molecule.  In a very vague, out of focus view, what insulation compound is mission critical to the nervous system of vertebrates is needed in a vast excess compared to its dual role in membrane and cell cycle of arterial cells.  Very simply, the amount of cholesterol needed in the brain is far beyond what is needed in the artery, and important amounts of collagen are there in very specific orientations in health.  If the compounds for axon health and artery health were independent, then two things could be made and this problem of one thing being helpful to one system and harmful to another system solved.  A very absurd request of evolutionary processes which for humans are slow - thousands of years.  We're talking about completely re-engineering the lipid genetics of humanity.  In the meantime, we can pull up and pull down our levers with medicine knowing all this.  Is it futile?  NO.  A short, perfect, benevolent life is better than a short, terrible, malevolent, life for humanity.

So if we all plan to live forever, we have to figure out how to both steel our arteries against its pot hole plaster cast, cholesterol, without starving our brains of cholesterol.  It's a true conundrum.

In ending, Linus Pauling's specific recommend for large human adults was no less than 6,000 mg of vitamin C throughout a day, not in one dose but divided throughout a day to at least avoid atherosclerotic problems without other pharmaceutical interventions, specifically to enhance collagen repair within the artery.  Which collagen he didn't know, but Novo Nordisk identifies this to be Collagen IV(4).