Breaking the Cooperation Among Cancer Cells Is the Key to Prolonging Patient Survival
Like humans, bees, and ants, cancer cells rely on cooperation among individuals to survive and multiply. Cancer cells that fight alone find it very hard to survive: first, because a single cancer cell can hardly draw nutrients from its surroundings; second, because such scattered, solitary cells are easily defeated by the immune system. It is just like us humans: if we lived alone in nature, we could neither obtain enough resources nor withstand the disasters of the natural world.
Cancer cells therefore form alliances with their own kind, assembling into collectives called cancer cell clusters. Within a cluster the cells help and benefit one another, share growth factors, jointly resist the immune system, and cooperatively promote angiogenesis, so as to better supply the cancerous tissue with nutrients and drive tumor progression more efficiently.
When a cancer cell cluster grows strong enough, it becomes the despot within its host. It recklessly consumes the host's nutrients, causing the host's normal cells to fail because they cannot draw enough nourishment. The host thereby grows extremely weak until death ensues.
Therefore, when treating cancer, it is crucial to defeat the individual cells within the cluster one by one, inhibit tumor angiogenesis, prevent them from uniting, and block them from forming a powerful aggregate. This explains why anti-angiogenic drugs and TCM herbs that activate blood and resolve stasis (or break blood and expel stasis) can prolong patient survival. In fact, modern pharmacological research shows that most TCM softening-hardness and dispersing-node herbs—also the principal anticancer Chinese herbs—work mainly by inhibiting platelet aggregation and the formation of blood vessels.
The latest research shows that cancer metastasis occurs very early in the disease, and that cancer cells migrate in highly complex and widespread ways during the early stage. We cannot block cancer cell migration, because cancer cells hijack our wound-healing signaling systems and have long used them to scatter their progeny everywhere. Whenever some part of the body, for whatever reason, develops an environment hospitable to cancer cells—such as persistent inflammation—they can implant there and form metastatic foci. A more realistic goal is to prevent them from growing into the enormous tumors and tumor emboli that are fatal.
Within a tumor there is a very intriguing phenomenon: 75%–99.99% of the cells are non-cancer-stem cells that can no longer form tumors—that is, they cannot reproduce and leave descendants. The true cancer stem cells capable of leaving descendants are extremely few. They are like the "queen ant" in a colony, while the non-reproductive cancer cells are like worker ants; their value lies in cooperating to reproduce the queen. They provide the queen with food and build protective systems so that she can breed in a well-fed and relatively safe environment. Once the resource-supply system built by these sacrificing "worker ants" is destroyed, the "queen" can hardly survive or reproduce either.
The tumor depends on those non-reproductive cancer cells to build its resource-supply system, and the most critical part of that system is the blood vessels. We know that every cell in the body depends on blood vessels and capillaries for nutrients and oxygen, and cancer cells are no exception.
Small cancer cell clusters, whose blood-supply systems are not yet well developed, are not yet fatal to the body. Once they develop into very large clusters with elaborate vascular systems, the tumor grows extremely rapidly. Thus the later the stage, the faster the tumor grows; sometimes within just a few days a tumor can grow several times larger at an astonishing rate. Moreover, because advanced cancer patients harbor more than one such large cluster, surgery cannot easily remove them all—resecting so many tumors would mean cutting away many of the patient's vital tissues, and the patient would not survive.
We must destroy the cancer cells' cooperation before the cluster hardens into an impregnable aggregate, which is why the earlier a tumor is treated, the better. Ancient Chinese physicians observed that tumors are richly vascularized, and the anti-tumor drugs they selected—such as leech (Shuizhi), earthworm (Dilong), frankincense (Ruxiang), myrrh (Moyao), blister beetle (Banmao), Coix seed (Yiyiren), Sparganium (Sanleng), Curcuma rhizome (Ezhu), Salvia (Danshen), ground beetle (Dibiechong), horsefly (Mengchong), turtle shell (Biejia), Pinellia (Banxia), Arisaema (Tiannanxing), Sargassum (Haizao), and Ecklonia (Kunbu)—all have anti-angiogenic effects.
Moreover, TCM compound-formula treatment is much like the modern "cocktail therapy": it does not rely on any single drug but on the coordinated action of multiple herbs to achieve multi-target anticancer effects. Against a complex disease like cancer, we indeed cannot win with a single approach.