Restoration of Chemo-Surveillance as a Top Priority to Save Cancer Patients

Abstract

Cancer mortality is very high and is still increasing. The objective of this study is to rely on the restoration of chemo-surveillance to reduce cancer mortality called for by President Biden in his cancer moonshot initiative speech last year. The reason cancer mortality remains so high is that we are not pursuing the right approach on cancer therapy. Cancer is caused by wound unhealing due to the collapse of chemo-surveillance. Chemo-surveillance is the nature’s creation of allosteric regulation to keep cells with abnormal methylation enzymes (MEs) under control.  Wound healing comes naturally because the nature creates chemo-surveillance to ensure the perfection of wound healing. Wound healing requires the proliferation and the terminal differentiation of progenitor stem cells (PSCs). Efficient differentiation of PSCs is a critical mechanism of wound healing. MEs play an essential role in the regulation of cell replication and differentiation. In telomerase-expressing cells, MEs are associated with telomerase to alter the kinetic properties of MEs and the regulation in favour of cell growth, which is important for wound healing. Chemo-surveillance is an important safety mechanism to avoid unnecessary build-up of cells with abnormal MEs to cause clinical symptoms such as tissue fibrosis, dementia, organ failure and cancer. Chemo-surveillance can be destroyed under pathological conditions producing elevated tumor necrosis factor (TNF) to cause cachexia symptoms resulting in the collapse of chemo-surveillance. PSCs are then forced to evolve into cancer stem cells (CSCs) by a single hit to silence the TET-1 enzyme to escape contact inhibition which limits the extent of PSCs to build up. The inability of CSCs to undergo terminal differentiation due to the collapse of chemo-surveillance eventually forces CSCs to progress to faster-growing cancer cells (CCs) through chromosomal abnormalities such as translocations or deletions to activate oncogenes or to inactivate suppressor genes to become full-blown cancer. Obviously, the collapse of chemo-surveillance is a critical event in the development of cancer, restoration of chemo-surveillance is, therefore, an easy and effective solution to save cancer patients.