part0012

We are sure that you know someone who has had cancer. You most likely also know someone who had cancer and had all the conventional treatments, which can include surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. After that they were declared “cancer-free.” Three or four years later, maybe even longer, the cancer returned. Perhaps it was in the same location or elsewhere on the body. Maybe you know someone for whom cancer has returned three or more times.

This is heartbreaking.

As we’ve said in the previous chapters, cancer is an extremely complex disease. Cancer often returns after a long and grueling cancer treatment because cancer cells are smart and can evolve into cancer stem cells.

Cancer cells are the geniuses of the biochemical world. They’re undoubtedly smarter than your average brain or bone or skin cell. Cancer cells are driven for self-preservation, with strength far beyond the survival instincts of normal cells. Like all life forms, they fight like demons to survive, but they are also incredibly intelligent, intelligent enough to thwart most attempts to kill them. It’s almost like they have their own brains.

Those resistant cancer cells find a way to hide and survive, and some eventually emerge again and thrive. These are cancer stem cells, and they can be deadly. When cancers return, they tend to be far more vicious and more aggressive than they were the first time around and far more resistant to cancer treatments.

When a child is conceived, the egg and the sperm divide into a handful of healthy stem cells. Stem cells are the point of origination for all tissues in the body. Malleable like a child’s Play-Doh, stem cells can become any kind of cells. They can be brain cells, heart cells, pancreas cells, skin cells or hair and nail cells. Stem cells are the superheroes of the body, capable of unlimited potential.

Cancer stem cells are different. We are not born with cancer stem cells. They are a tiny subset of cancer cells themselves — so named because they can be the point of origination for a cancer recurrence. They can disguise themselves and lie low, avoiding chemo and radiation therapy. When the coast is clear, they can spring forward and start making cancer cells again.

Cancer stem cells initiate and maintain cancer and contribute to recurrence and drug resistance, which we’ll explore in the next chapter.

Cancer stem cells have immortality – or near-immortality. Think of them as super-cells. As we’ve learned in earlier chapters, cancer cells do not have a normal lifespan like healthy cells. They live on and on, reproducing in their twisted fashion, creating more cancer cells and larger tumors that can spread throughout the body. They can also send messages to the cancer cells to resist chemotherapy drugs.

These cancer stem cells have an uncanny ability to hide from conventional medicine’s diagnostic “radar,” lurking in the body’s deepest recesses, appearing to sleep or staying quiet for months, even years, before they awaken and begin to grow again with a vengeance.

Not only that, but some ordinary cancer cells can transform themselves into cancer stem cells, increasing their power exponentially.

You’ll note we said, “most,” but not “all” attempts to kill cancer stem cells have failed. Conventional medicine offers absolutely nothing that can touch them.

Understanding and eliminating cancer stem cells is the cutting edge of cancer research today.

But there is now enormous hope: The latest research has confirmed that a botanical treatment is astonishingly effective against the best-laid plans of cancer cells.

Dr, Goel was honored to lead a creative and brilliant research team at Baylor University. He headed the Center for Gastrointestinal Research and the Center for Epigenetics, Cancer Prevention, and Cancer Genomics in Dallas until the summer of 2019.

This team was the first to create organoids for research in botanical treatments for cancer. These are tiny three-dimensional versions of the cancerous tumors and then subjected the organoids to various substances without harming the patients. Think of those organoids as stand-ins identical to the actual tumors.

Organoids are conglomerations of cells, but the unique thing is that they are exact 3D replicas of the cancerous tumors in real human patients. In the past, we have been able to work with laboratory-generated cell lines and animals, but, for ethical reasons, it is extremely complicated to do research on human subjects. Now we can take an exact replica of human tumors outside the patient’s body, look directly into them, and discover precisely what will work to kill them.

Remember, Dr. Goel said that each patient’s cancer is individual and requires unique ways of treating it? These stand-in clones of the actual tumor give us a perfect way to discover the treatments that work as opposed to lab-grown cell cultures or animal experimentation, which may or may not reflect how a given substance might act in humans.

The immensely exciting discovery from our research team is this: French grape seed extract is enormously effective in killing cancer stem cells.

Let us repeat that: The OPCs in French grape seed extract killed cancer stem cells. Other than curcumin (stay with me for more on that), French grape seed extract is the only substance, natural or pharmaceutical in our experience that stops cancer stem cells from reproducing.

In Dr. Goel’s lab, we exposed those cancer organoids to OPCs and found that in just five days, the presence of cancer in those organoids was dramatically decreased.

These unique studies are the only ones done using human-derived organoids. It proves that botanicals like French grape seed extract can be used for precisely targeted cancer treatments.

Remember those ordinary cancer cells that have somehow acquired a superpower to transform themselves into cancer stem cells?

The OPCs in French grape seed extract have that problem in hand, too.

All cells, including cancer cells, communicate with each other. Think of it as an electrical network. So, what happens if one part of that network is cut? The entire network fails.

With cancer, a network called Hippo (no need to go into the complex science behind this one!) is responsible for carrying the signal that tells those ordinary cancer cells to morph into cancer stem cells. But what if the Hippo network is interrupted? No new cancer stem cells form, and existing cancer stem cells can no longer reproduce. Cancer becomes much easier to treat and destroy.

While Dr. Goel’s team’s breakthrough research is on colorectal cancer, we are confident, and voluminous other research has confirmed, it will translate to a wide variety of other types of cancer.