[HN Gopher] Giving T cells extra batteries supercharges them aga...
___________________________________________________________________
Giving T cells extra batteries supercharges them against cancer
Author : peutetre
Score : 164 points
Date : 2024-09-24 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newatlas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newatlas.com)
| Zelphyr wrote:
| This is why good quality nutrition is so important. It's like
| giving all of our cells--not just T cells--extra batteries.
| tjohns wrote:
| To be fair, I'd prefer not to give the cancer cells extra
| batteries.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| In truth, it's usually the opposite when our bodies are
| fueled properly.
| hansvm wrote:
| I thought I remembered something about certain nutrients
| (magnesium?) being something you could intentionally reduce
| to slow down cancer growth -- kind of like a DIY
| chemotherapy; your cells need Mg to grow and multiply, but
| cancer cells need it more. Paired with other treatments,
| where applicable, the reduced nutrient diet had positive
| clinical outcomes.
| parineum wrote:
| Define "quality nutrition" and cite a source.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| My health has been improving by eating according to this
| book:
|
| https://a.co/d/2dHgtQr
| fhieufn wrote:
| "Quality nutrition" is any scientifically backed research
| results on good health.
|
| Here is a resource that uses research to back up its
| claims:
| https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/dietary-
| reference...
|
| And it has a good tool to find and meet those results:
| https://multimedia.efsa.europa.eu/drvs/index.htm
| nradov wrote:
| Really? Most clinical trials for nutritional therapy as a
| cancer treatment haven't produced significant results.
| fhieufn wrote:
| This is a surprising position.
|
| Can you link to any?
|
| Everything I have read on the subject says obesity, a
| nutritional imbalance, is one of the main contributors to
| cancer growth, and specifically a reduction in sugar and
| meat have significant positive results in combating
| cancer's growth.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9559313/
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9775518/
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/04708699
| 76....
| nradov wrote:
| There is no reliable evidence that red meat consumption
| increases cancer risk. You are spreading medical
| misinformation by incorrectly interpreting low-quality
| observational studies.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Weird I feel like I read the opposite, that a high
| protein/fat diet would slow cancer because it thrives on
| glucose, so cutting carbs/sugar was key.
|
| It seems counter intuitive to me that meat & sugar would
| both be correlated because they are almost opposites from
| a metabolic standpoint. One is pure fat/protein and one
| is just glucose.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| We might know what causes some growth, but it's not
| homogeneous, and we certainly can't stop it with diet
| alone once it starts.
|
| https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-
| news/2019/10/keto-f...
|
| >> But Mukherjee's August 2018 paper in Nature also found
| that a ketogenic diet was helpful -- even "synergistic"
| -- with certain cancers and certain treatments. At least
| in mice.
|
| >> "It's probably most helpful in cancers that utilize
| the PIK3CA / AKT / MTOR pathway [an intracellular
| signaling pathway]"
| adamredwoods wrote:
| A common goal, but tumors mutate and bypass a lot of normal
| cell functions. Keep in mind that when dying cancer patients
| starve in the end, the tumors don't slow.
|
| https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/study-unveils-new-way-
| starve...
|
| https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2024/05/02/drug-
| shows...
|
| https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/01/30/starving-
| cancer...
| vaylian wrote:
| How is this related to the number of mitochondria in a cell?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I believe that the opposite is useful, fasting -> autophagy
| -> improved mitochondrial health (not sure). Maybe that's
| what parent tried to say.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| nah. let's base the entire world diet on numbers of calories,
| provided by crops which are collected annually or biannually so
| we can have an efficient futures market :thumbsupemoji
| tekla wrote:
| Yep, we prefer to keep people alive first since its hard to
| care about the health and well being of dead people.
| Laaas wrote:
| > The team cultured BMSCs and T cells together, and after 48
| hours found that up to a quarter of the T cells had gained extra
| mitochondria. The researchers dubbed these juiced up immune cells
| Mito+.
|
| What an incredibly simple idea. Just scale it up.
| gorkish wrote:
| How many do you have to have before you can start using the
| Force?
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| "The midichlorian is the forcehouse of the cell."
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| "Whatever the stupid, lazy writers at Disney needed it to be
| this week." - The Critical Drinker*
|
| * I imagine
| rpmisms wrote:
| That's probably what he would say. The actual minimum to be
| able to use the force is a 7000 midichlorian count.
| politician wrote:
| I thought it was over 9000.
| adamc wrote:
| Totally a tangent, but he's right about that. It was a flaw
| in Harry Potter as well. There was no logical system to how
| magic worked; spells did whatever plot requirements said
| they did. And it detracts from the sense of realism in a
| world when the magic just does whatever is needed at the
| moment.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But. It's. Magic.
|
| Magic can do anything. That's why it's magic. How does it
| work? Magic. It's a perfectly complete circle in logic.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Well, magic still needs to follow some kind of rules for
| it to be usable. Otherwise "magic" would just be
| something random (or maybe chaotic - we just haven't
| figured out the rules well enough).
| mrkstu wrote:
| Or, you can do the Brandon Sanderson thing, and have a
| comprehensive system that has limits and a consistent
| expression of magical power.
| dylan604 wrote:
| but then it's no longer magic. it now becomes some sort
| of metaphysical science. magic is magic. once you
| understand it, it is no longer magic.
| jajko wrote:
| Sounds like most religions. And most modern folks having
| issues with religions they were brought up in don't have
| _this_ as their main issue with it.
|
| One addresses child's imagination which just wants to be
| wowed, the other our eternal fear of unknown and death.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The very much NSFW web comic Oglaf had a strip about
| this.
|
| In this rare instance, the comic is SFW, but still be
| wary. https://www.oglaf.com/claret/
| adamc wrote:
| Compare to, say, "A Wizard of Earthsea", where magic is
| explained in a different way that points out that while a
| wizard _could_ transmute one substance into another, no
| wizard would, because of the far-reaching ramifications.
|
| The system was not fully elucidated by any means, but the
| subtlety of it was suggested by such things as Ged
| deducing that the doorkeeper was one of the seven masters
| of Roke.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Acknowledging it is a children's book...
|
| I take significantly bigger issue with the lack of
| societal change from having magic. Way too much of wizard
| society was "Muggles + occasional party tricks". When you
| can conjure food, water, automatons, etc from nothing,
| nature of living would change completely.
|
| You can brew luck? I would be mainlining that stuff every
| day. Time travel is given to children? Why is there a
| train when there are a dozen different ways of magicking
| yourself around the world?
|
| Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality touched on
| these inconsistencies.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Less than you'd think. Not even master Yoda has a
| mitochondria count that high!
| tomrod wrote:
| A more direct reference, though maybe obscure these days, is
| _Parasite_ _Eve_
| gl-prod wrote:
| Come on, T cells, you can do it
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| ..in mice
| dopylitty wrote:
| >Previous studies have shown that cancer cells can use nanotubes
| like "tiny tentacles" to slurp up mitochondria from immune cells.
|
| Biology is nuts.
|
| Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up
| with the current number of mitochondria per cell. Usually with
| these things there's some kind of push and pull between the
| benefits of something and the drawbacks. Or sometimes it's just
| whatever works. I know mitochondria can have some negative
| impacts on cells sometimes by releasing the byproducts of
| metabolism (reactive oxygen species) or triggering programmed
| cell death.
| golergka wrote:
| Could it be just amount of energy available to the organism?
| Modern humans are in completely unique position relative to all
| history of life on Earth, having access to as much food (and
| energy) as we want, and having a widespread problem of eating
| too much. Evolution didn't have any chance to catch up with
| this reality.
| kurthr wrote:
| I really appreciate the commentary here on HN. The headline was
| awful enough, but the quotes, really let me know the level of
| horror movie aesthetic there is in the commentary supposedly
| about biology.
|
| Thanks, NewAtlas, but it's just not the mixed metaphor I'm
| looking for.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up
| with the current number of mitochondria per cell.
|
| An over active immune is generally a bad thing for the host.
| Maybe a higher number increases auto immune disease?
| devmor wrote:
| Not just a bad thing - one of the worst possible things.
| That's how you get chronic inflammation.
| derefr wrote:
| Dunno about mitochondria as a cell feature specifically. But
| there exists a similar constraint on the total size of the DNA
| in the cell nucleus (and therefore the ability of a species to
| survive polyploid mutations that double-or-more the amount of
| DNA per cell); and I believe we _do_ (think that we) understand
| the cause of that one.
|
| This polyploidy constraint only exists for animal cells, not
| for plant cells. Plants can -- and frequently do! -- get as
| polyploid as they want; but animals have a ceiling.
|
| And that implies that the constraint has something to do with
| one of the main differences between plant and animal cells:
| namely, the fact that animal cells -- specifically, blood cells
| -- must _move and flow_ along channels composed of other cells;
| while plant cells are fixed in place by their stiff cellulose
| membranes, with only fluids and tissues flowing.
|
| The problem animal cells have with polyploidy, is seemingly
| that it makes their cells _physically larger_ -- and in so
| doing, causes biological architectural assumptions like "blood
| cells can travel through narrow capillaries to deliver oxygen
| to cells within extremity tissues" to just fail to hold. The
| capillaries, when composed of larger cells, are narrower; and
| the blood cells flowing through, composed of larger cells,
| won't fit.
|
| (Evolution could in theory resolve this single problem by just
| scaling all features up in size. But that causes far more
| problems than it solves: the square-cube law requires huge
| changes to things like muscles and metabolism to keep up with
| increased size, if it's even possible; and some organs/tissues
| just _require_ to be a certain size to function -- like the
| nephrons of the kidneys -- such that these instead need to stay
| the same size, evolving distinct adaptations to handle the
| increased size of the cells that travel to /through them.)
| cyberax wrote:
| > blood cells can travel through narrow capillaries to
| deliver oxygen to cells within extremity tissues
|
| Mammalian red blood cells do not have DNA or mitochondria.
| They lose them during the maturation process in the bone
| marrow.
|
| But apparently this might just be one of the evolution's
| blind turns. Birds have even faster metabolism with higher
| oxygen requirements, and their red blood cells have nucleus.
| Vecr wrote:
| I think derefr might be talking about the cells that form
| the walls of the capillaries being bigger, so you can't
| really fit them in the places you need them, and if you
| tried they'd be too narrow.
|
| Except replace "you" with evolution and delete "tried".
| derefr wrote:
| When I say "blood cells", I mean "all blood cells", not
| specifically "red blood cells." Anywhere your blood plasma
| flows, _all_ types of blood cells are carried along with
| it.
|
| As such, to prevent infarction, every capillary in your
| body must be at least wide enough, in its narrowest state,
| to still accommodate the passage of the _largest_ blood
| cell type the body produces, in its _largest_ state.
| (Which, for us humans, is probably something like "a
| neutrophil that is bloated from just having consumed a
| large bacterium.")
| hollerith wrote:
| The neutrophils and macrophages don't reliably know to
| exit the bloodstream when they're bloated?
| derefr wrote:
| Even if they did, they still might have ended up catching
| and eating the bacterium right at your fingertip. (Heck,
| that's not even an edge-case -- fingertips and other
| extremeties served by the tiniest of bloodflow channels,
| get wounded and infected pretty often!)
|
| Think of it like: what would civic street sizing
| regulations look like, if fire trucks -- already the
| longest thing most residential streets need to
| accommodate -- had to rapidly reconfigure and redeploy
| into an _even longer_ shape, while sitting there on the
| street, to do their job; and then were stuck in this
| state until they made it back to the depot?
| hollerith wrote:
| I see. Thanks.
| rolisz wrote:
| From listening to Michael Levin, he describes how in newts
| you can multiply the DNA of kidney cells (or some tubules
| around there). The cells become larger, so they adapt by
| forming the same size of tubule with fewer cells. If you keep
| duplicating the DNA, at some point a single cell is enough to
| form the tubule, which it does by bending around.
| shagie wrote:
| The fun part is scaling the _other_ way... for tiny animals.
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-
| amoeba-s...
|
| > You can't shrink down to the size of an amoeba without
| losing parts of yourself. That's the lesson one researcher is
| taking away from a microscopic analysis of the fairy wasp
| (Megaphragma mymaripenne), which at a mere 200 micrometers in
| length is one of the world's smallest animals (shown compared
| to a paramecium and amoeba above). When the scientist
| compared the neurons of adult and pupae fairy wasps, he
| discovered that more than 95% of adult neurons lack a
| nucleus.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14678.
| ..
|
| > The smallest insects are comparable in size to unicellular
| organisms. Thus, their size affects their structure not only
| at the organ level, but also at the cellular level. Here we
| report the first finding of animals with an almost entirely
| anucleate nervous system. Adults of the smallest flying
| insects of the parasitic wasp genus Megaphragma (Hymenoptera:
| Trichogrammatidae) have only 339-372 nuclei in the central
| nervous system, i.e., their ganglia, including the brain,
| consist almost exclusively of processes of neurons. In
| contrast, their pupae have ganglia more typical of other
| insects, with about 7400 nuclei in the central nervous
| system. During the final phases of pupal development, most
| neuronal cell bodies lyse. As adults, these insects have many
| fewer nucleated neurons, a small number of cell bodies in
| different stages of lysis, and about 7000 anucleate cells.
| Although most neurons lack nuclei, these insects exhibit many
| important behaviors, including flight and searching for
| hosts.
|
| And the Wikipedia article for the species -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphragma_mymaripenne
|
| In particular:
|
| > Researchers believe the wasp can survive without nuclei
| because of its short lifespan; the proteins manufactured
| during the pupal stage last the animal long enough to
| complete its life journey.
| derefr wrote:
| Interesting, but not surprising -- DNA, and the cellular
| nucleus itself, aren't truly _required_ to make our cells
| "go". (At least over the span of a few days.)
|
| That is, after all, what _radiation poisoning_ is: a
| complete destruction of your DNA in your cells, while the
| cells themselves (attempt to) continue to function. And
| they do! For some number of days. And that 's _without_ any
| of our evolutionary ancestors ever having been under
| evolutionary pressure to live without DNA (as far as we
| know.)
|
| IIRC, cell death from radiation poisoning follows a bathtub
| curve.
|
| * There's firstly a lot of immediate cell death from
| apoptosis -- probably due damaged DNA starting to do
| something that looks like cancer, and autolyse safeguards
| activating in response. This is what a radiation "burn" is.
|
| * But then, after that, everything's actually fine for a
| while. You're just sitting there for a few days, operating
| normally -- despite the majority of your cells now having
| massive holes shot through their DNA, with any attempt to
| unzip that DNA to copy it failing.
|
| After that few days, you get massive waves of cell death --
| the part of radiation poisoning that actually kills you.
| This likely arrives, due to cells experiencing various
| inputs that they see as triggers to attempt some kind of
| state-transition (whether a minor one, between e.g. glucose
| vs ketone metabolism; or a major one, e.g. into mitosis.)
| And doing that requires flipping some epigenetic
| methylation switches to start producing different proteins
| -- which requires the DNA be un-rolled and re-rolled. The
| cell tries it; it fails; and there's no "error handling"
| for the case of "you started a state transition but can't
| connect to the blueprint database", so the cell just
| "deadlocks" in a volatile state -- e.g. one where
| metabolism is shut down, so purine waste builds up until
| the cell lyses for chemical reasons.
|
| So it's not too surprising that an organism could evolve to
| just _intentionally not trigger_ such cellular state-
| transitions -- likely no longer expressing any of the
| state-transition "machinery" at all. Such an organism
| would get quite far with their cells just "doing the thing
| they were programmed to do", without a nucleus. Even
| cellular metabolism would continue!
|
| There'd just be nowhere to get "replacement parts" for
| proteins as the original proteins break down or get
| oxidized by some radical -- thus the lifespan limit.
|
| Also, something not mentioned in what you linked, but which
| seems like an obvious corollary: I would guess that such
| organisms would likely be "metabolically fragile." I.e.,
| they likely have dropped anything like adrenaline
| signalling, as the whole point of that is to get cells to
| state-transition. So they'll be a bit like a person taking
| alpha-blockers, who gets winded extremely easily because
| the drugs are preventing their cells from "gearing up." For
| this organism, there _are_ no other gears to switch to. The
| organism is a fixie.
| shagie wrote:
| > IIRC, cell death from radiation poisoning follows a
| bathtub curve.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
| (this one is safe)
|
| https://www-
| pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81... (this
| is NSFL beyond a certain point)
|
| > On a cold day of 2 December 2001, three inhabitants of
| Lia (later designated as Patients 1-DN, 2-MG and 3-MB)
| drove their truck approximately 45-50 km east of Lia to
| collect firewood. At around 18:00, they found two
| containers -- metallic, cylindrical objects -- lying on a
| forest path. Around them, the snow had curiously thawed
| within a radius of approximately 1 m, and the wet soil
| was steaming. All three individuals stated that the two,
| rather heavy, cylindrical objects (8-10 kg, 10 cm x 15
| cm) were found by chance while carrying out their usual
| task of collecting firewood.
|
| > One of the three men (Patient 3-MB) picked up one of
| the cylindrical objects and, finding that it was hot,
| dropped it immediately. They planned to place the
| gathered wood in their truck the next morning, and
| because it was getting dark, they decided to spend the
| night in the forest, using the hot objects they had
| discovered as personal heaters.
|
| Section 6 on page 36 is where it gets NSFL. It only gets
| worse as you continue going through the timeline. There
| are pictures - they are not for the weak of stomach.
|
| Section 4 is neat from the engineering perspective...
| "how do you move something that is radioactive enough to
| melt the snow around it?"
| ceedan wrote:
| > Regarding messing with T-cells I wonder how evolution came up
| with the current number of mitochondria per cell.
|
| Cells can increase their number of mitochondria in response to
| things (mitochondrial biogenesis). I don't know anything about
| how that works out in the immune system, but have read about it
| related to fat cells and exercise.
|
| This was also my first thought, and it seems like "giving them
| extra batteries" accomplishes the same outcome
| ben_w wrote:
| > I wonder how evolution came up with the current number of
| mitochondria per cell
|
| One of my probably-wrong ideas that I can't usefully ask* is if
| chronic fatigue/post-acute infection syndromes may be due to
| insufficient mitochondria for whatever reason.
|
| * if I ask StackExchange, I'll probably phrase it wrong enough
| to have it closed; if I ask an LLM then it will probably make
| something up because if the answer exists at all it is probably
| behind a paywall, and even if it isn't they do that 10-20% of
| them time anyway.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Closure on a Stack Exchange site isn't supposed to be
| permanent: it just means "this question isn't answerable (by
| us) yet". Maybe try, and see what happens?
| agumonkey wrote:
| > Biology is nuts.
|
| for this particular case I 100% agree. I grew up to accept a
| wide range of complexity at the cell level, but this blew
| through the roof.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Incredible result, but my god do I hate this kind of headline.
| kthartic wrote:
| Why? As a laymen (who knows nothing about "T cells") the
| analogy helps
| phkahler wrote:
| Batteries == Mitochondira
|
| So I wondered how one could increase the number of mitochondria
| and quickly found this nice piece from 2017 about promoting
| mitochondrial fission in mid-life (ok in fruit flys):
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00525-4
|
| I'm pretty sure maintaining mitochondrial health will help a lot
| of health problems. They seem to come up every little while in
| regard to _many_ different pathologies.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| > So I wondered how one could increase the number of
| mitochondria
|
| Lots of Zone-2 training. Inigo San-Milan & George Brooks are
| the two researchers to look at this for in humans.
| ceedan wrote:
| Their research seems to be in relation to muscle and fat -
| not the immune system and cancer. I wouldn't expect zone 2
| training to improve "T cell exhaustion" where mitochondria
| are stolen from T-cells by cancer cells.
|
| > Previous studies have shown that cancer cells can use
| nanotubes like "tiny tentacles" to slurp up mitochondria from
| immune cells.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Yeah, batteries was a funny metaphor given that everybody from
| my generation learned that Mitochondria are the "powerhouse of
| the cell" in Junior High.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| From the headline, I was almost sure it was going to be about
| giving T-cells ATP, which is much more commonly (and
| appropriately) analogized to biological batteries.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Completely spitballing here, but if bone marrow cells help
| charge up mitochondria (as this new study suggests), then
| strong healthy bones are a good defense against cancer.
| Resistance training (weightlifting being the most common
| variety) is well known to improve bone health so maybe this is
| another reason to practice it.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe the reason elephants don't get more cancer despite
| their comparatively large cell count.
| privacyking wrote:
| They don't get cancer because they have a metric f ton of
| tumour suppressor genes copies, and we have relatively few
| and so it's easier for all of ours to get knocked off to
| form a cancer
| aidenn0 wrote:
| In America, batteries are have cells. In Soviet Russa^W^W Poorly
| Written Headlines, cells have batteries.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Great! When can I buy Mitochondria Supplements at the grocery
| store? /s
| dazzlevolta wrote:
| For what type(s) of cancer does this seem to be promising?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Mostly blood cancers. It's not quite there for solid tumors.
|
| https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > Intriguingly, Mito+ cells could multiply quickly and pass their
| extra mitochondria to the new cells.
|
| Is this accurate? I thought T cells can't multiply.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-24 23:01 UTC)