Understanding Research - X kills Cancer

”This new drug has been shown to kill cancer cells.”

Ah, yes, one of my favorite topics. Stuff that kills cancer. Nowadays, everything seems to kill cancer. Everything but chemotherapy. But why do people think this? An example:

Metformin reduced the clonogenic survival of FSaII mouse fibrosarcoma cells and MCF-7 human breast cancer cells in dose and time-dependent manner as shown in Fig. 1. In FSaII cells (Fig. 1A), incubation with 1.0 mM metformin for 1 h reduced the clonogenic survival of cells to 65.1%, and incubation for 24 h or 48 h reduced the survival to 49.3% and 28.7%, respectively.

Okay, what does that mean? They incubated the cells with metformin. Incubating cells usually means putting them in a flask with the chemical they’re being incubated with. The flask is closed and then we wait.

When cells were cultured in the presence of metformin in the above mentioned studies, the size of resultant colonies and the cell density in the colonies were found to be reduced as compared with the colonies formed in regular medium.

Cultured in the presence of metformin, that means they let a cell line grow with metformin present. Still only a petri dish (basically, they might be using a different container. Mammalian cells are annoying to work with).

And what is their conclusion?

Nevertheless, our results clearly indicated for the first time that metformin is potentially effective to enhance the efficacy of radiotherapy.

Note the key word potentially. But wait, how could anyone twist this into “Metformin kills cancer”? Well, look at what their caption looks like:

Metformin kills and radiosensitizes cancer cells and preferentially kills cancer stem cells

Take a journalist who needs a great headline or someone who doesn’t actually read the whole article and boom. Metformin kills cancer.

So if you read that scientists discovered some great new way of killing cancer, you should ask: How did they test it? Only on cell lines or on actually living humans? And how many humans did they test? What were the actual results?

Don’t believe something just because the headline seems to imply a specific result.

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Source:

Metformin kills and radiosensitizes cancer cells and preferentially kills cancer stem cells

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