[HN Gopher] Tumor-derived erythropoietin acts as immunosuppressi...
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Tumor-derived erythropoietin acts as immunosuppressive switch in
cancer immunity
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-04-25 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| w10-1 wrote:
| It would be nice to see the original article.
|
| But at face value this looks very promising.
|
| This identifies one way solid tumors avoid immune attack and
| identifies corresponding therapeutic targets that could span
| solid tumor types.
|
| EPO (erythropoietin) (aside from stimulating red-blood-cell
| production) also converts tumor-local macrophages from attacking
| to suppressing immune attacks. Tumors are shown to produce EPO
| themselves.
|
| Tumors spontaneously regressed due to revived immune response
| when blocking either EPO or the EPO receptor on the macrophages.
|
| The model was murine liver cancer, but high blood EPO levels are
| known to be poor prognosticators in many solid tumor cancers.
|
| This summary points to NRF2 (nuclear factor erythroid 2-related
| factor 2) as a regulatory target, but without any detail.
|
| AFAICT there are no approved drugs blocking EPO receptors and no
| drugs to reduce EPO; there are some anti-anemia drugs that
| increase production.
| badmonster wrote:
| yeah i cannot read the full article
| mariusor wrote:
| Let me guess, this research was sponsored by Lance Armstrong?
| hinkley wrote:
| Huh. I assumed this was going to be a collision of acronyms but
| erythropoietin is the same EPO used medicinally to treat anemia
| and abused by several generations of endurance athletes
| (complications include strokes and heart attacks from blood
| clot).
|
| It's a stress-signaling hormone produced by the kidneys when
| they detect hypoxia and triggers more red blood cell production
| in bone marrow.
| mariusor wrote:
| What makes this mildly funny, though I admit in quite poor
| taste, is the fact that Armstrong did indeed suffer of cancer
| to which he lost a testicle before his comeback to win
| multiple Tour de France back to back. So theoretically his
| EPO positive results could be attributed to those tumors
| producing it, if this research is to be believed. Maybe not
| all of the times though.
| hinkley wrote:
| He was on steroids post treatment as well. Chemotherapy
| likes to cause anemia. In fact I think that's where I first
| heard of EPO. Some survivor crowing about the efficacy at
| making them feel human again.
|
| And they've discovered in more recent studies that steroid
| use has effects that last about twice as long as it's
| detectable in your body (2 vs 1 year?). If sports weren't
| such a young person's game, I'd worry about people taking
| off for "surgery" and coming back built like a linebacker
| but testing clean.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test. The CEO of the
| insurance company responsible for underwriting bonus
| payments for Tour de France wins had read a book full of
| circumstantial evidence of the US Postal Service team
| doping and contested paying out the bonus. He knew they'd
| lose, but wanted to force the hands of some investigative
| body with real power to actually look into it. Federal
| prosecutors took up the case for a couple years, but then
| dropped it. Then USADA finally got a bunch of his former
| teammates and medical staffers to testify against him.
| Lance didn't even contest the finding because the evidence
| was so overwhelming, he figured his best course of action
| at that point was trying to keep the report confidential
| and winning in the court of public opinion instead,
| convincing all of his adoring fans that he was the victim
| of a witch hunt.
|
| Obviously, that didn't work, but I guess he was just ahead
| of his time. These days, he could have run for president.
| hinkley wrote:
| Tumors excreting chemicals to prevent destruction doesn't sound
| like DNA damage, that sounds like evolution.
|
| We know some cancers can be caused by viruses. And we know a few
| cancers that act like viruses in dogs and Tasmanian devils, and
| some rare cases in humans.
|
| We only figured out that ulcers are bacterial in origin within
| the lifetimes of many HN readers, and there are signs that other
| GI issues may be bacterial or viral (or bacteria-targeting viral)
| as well.
|
| Maybe we need to start culturing and DNA testing cancers.
| Kalanos wrote:
| You're right, DNA damage is just one of the types of genetic
| variation in cancer. There are many other structural variations
| that act like remixes.
|
| "Maybe we need to start culturing and DNA testing cancers." I
| assure you this is being done at a massive scale.
|
| Due to cellular stress, cancer cells disobey multi-cellular
| governance. They behave more like independent organisms
| fighting for survival, reverting to primal programming.
| hinkley wrote:
| Oh I know we are trying to genomically test them for oncology
| research and potential treatment plans, but do they do
| paternity tests on them?
|
| I was trying to remember which mammal in Australia gets
| tumors from fighting, and I found a reference to a mother
| getting melanoma from her daughter. It's unclear to me
| whether the cancer transmission was rare or the
| identification is rare.
| rflrob wrote:
| There's very often a comparison to the somatic (i.e. non-
| cancer) genome of the same patient. It's a great way to
| quality control that there wasn't some sample mixup in the
| lab.
|
| Transmission of cancer is rare in humans--if it were not,
| it would make someone's career to find many cases of it.
| While we can't say that all sheep are white, we've looked
| at enough of them to say that black sheep are not common.
| Furthermore, it's very clear how the Tasmanian devil cancer
| is spread--it's around the mouth while they are biting each
| others faces; it's not as obvious how one would spread most
| human cancers.
| hinkley wrote:
| Oh that makes sense. I forgot about differential
| analysis.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Is HPV an example?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Not really. It's a virus that can cause cancer and not
| the cancer itself.
| dekhn wrote:
| tasmanian devils [edit: I guess you already said that]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
| hinkley wrote:
| Yup. Link is handy though. Someone will post it to the
| front page in 14 hours :)
| superfist wrote:
| The cancer problem always struck me as more of a control
| theory challenge than a purely biological one.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They do genetically sequence cancers today, at least looking
| for specific markers.
| atombender wrote:
| > ulcers are bacter
|
| To be clear, _some_ peptic ulcers are caused by _H. pylori_ ,
| but not all ulcers.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yeah the real outcome of all this was "stress is not a cause
| of ulcers and other GI issues, but it can increase the
| negative impact" and "some uclers and other GI issues can be
| treated by antibiotics".
| hinkley wrote:
| The guy who won the Nobel prize for giving himself an ulcer
| estimated it as 90%, which is very comfortably "most". If
| that has been drastically estimated down I hadn't heard.
|
| Also don't abuse advil, kids. OTC painkillers can burn a hole
| in your digestive tract. I in fact know someone missing a few
| feet of intestine because of chronic back pain and overuse of
| non narcotic painkillers.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I did the oops too much Advil on myself naively over years.
| Gastritis and resolves once the cause is figured out but
| scared me to respect otc meds more.
| dekhn wrote:
| We already culture and DNA test cancers. Sometimes we can point
| at a secondary tumor and say "it came from this primary tumor".
| And we already know viral and bacterial infections can increase
| the likelihood of people getting malignant tumorws.
|
| Most scientists wouldn't call the hallmarks of cancer
| "evolution". I think instead most would say that cancer is an
| almost certainly unavoidable outcome of the complexity of
| eukaryotic organism's control of cellular replication.
|
| There's a series of papers organized around the "Hallmarks of
| Cancer" which help explain why nearly all tumors show the same
| properties- and how they are effectively due to dysregulation
| of evolutionary checkpoints and signalling. generally, an
| organism with a malignant tumor is less likely to reproduce.
| However, it's really far more complex than that ,
| atahanacar wrote:
| >Tumors excreting chemicals to prevent destruction doesn't
| sound like DNA damage, that sounds like evolution.
|
| One cell's DNA damage is another cell's evolution.
| panabee wrote:
| To provide more color on cancers caused by viruses, the World
| Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 9.9% of all cancers
| are attributable to viruses [1].
|
| Cancers with established viral etiology or strong association
| with viruses include:
|
| - Cervical cancer - Burkitt lymphoma - Hodgkin lymphoma -
| Gastric carcinoma - Kaposi's sarcoma - Nasopharyngeal carcinoma
| (NPC) - NK/T-cell lymphomas - Head and neck squamous cell
| carcinoma (HNSCC) - Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8831861
| rundmc wrote:
| Cancer is parasites.
|
| Tumours are dormant egg sacs that the body has encased to
| control the spread of the babies.
|
| Biopsies puncture the encasement and release the babies causing
| the 'cancer' to spread.
|
| All of the research proving the above can be found on X.
|
| What a shame that the scientists developing treatments for the
| symptoms are still blinded to the root cause when the rest of
| the world has woken up to the fraud being perpetrated upon us.
| SimplyUnknown wrote:
| Full paper link for the interested:
| https://ehdijrb3629whdb.tiiny.site
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| "404 Sorry, this content doesn't exist."
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