If you’re a pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, or lung cancer patient, and you’ve heard vitamin C is the cure, that isn’t true. But there is a clinical trial in process at Weill Cornell Medicine having to do with the utility of vitamin C in treating certain kinds of cancer patients.
“#VitaminC is playing a key role in our fight against #coloncancer & #pancreaticcancer. My colleagues at @nyphospital & @weillcornell have discovered they can use intravenous ascorbate to shrink tumors w/ KRAS & BRAF mutations: http://bit.ly/2GwKsBD #NYTopHospital #pancsm @SU2C,” tweeted Dr. Allyson Ocean, Medical Oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. Ascorbate is the medical term for vitamin C, so her tweet says that infusing vitamin C into the blood stream can shrink tumors.
Read MoreThe tumors involved use glucose as fuel for growth. “[The trial] basically demonstrates that patients with tumors who has KRAS or BRAF mutation, these tumors are hungry and dependent on glucose. So the tumors over-express a protein that allows glucose to enter,” says Dr. Shah.
And the receptors it produces to pick up glucose, also pick up vitamin C, and that’s important for destroying the cancer. “Turns out that vitamin C, when it gets oxidized outside the cell, enters through the same exact receptor and that actually leads to the buildup of pre-radical oxygen species, and that actually leads to killing the cell,” says Dr. Shah.
Dr. Shah calls the trial a “translational work,” which means taking concepts from biology and clinical trials and applying them to improve health outcomes. “This trial is sort of a complete translational work to verify that in KRAS of BRAF mutant tumors, Vitamin C may have some activity.” says Dr. Shah. “Vitamin C is given three to four times a week over a two to three hour infusion.”
At this point, the trial is going well. “You know, patients actually seem to be doing quite well with it because it’s a vitamin after all,” says Dr. Shah.
The Cancerous KRAS Mutation
We're in an era of targeted therapy where we want to identify molecular mutations and then leverage those to find better treatments.
of colon cancers have a mutation on the KRAS gene
Not all cancer patients with the KRAS or BRAF mutation are eligible for the trial. “The eligibility criteria included patients who have a KRAS or BRAF mutation, and who have progressed on at least one line of standard therapy,” says Dr. Shah. “And also we have another cohort where patients might get vitamin C for a brief period of time, two to four weeks, before surgery. So if you have a GI cancer, preferentially colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, or even a lung cancer, you might be eligible for the pre operative vitamin C portion. But the other portion is for metastatic patients who have progressed on first line therapy.”
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