
Cancer cells die in microgravity conditions – study - abhiminator
https://www.dw.com/en/zero-gravity-kills-cancer-cells/a-50230741
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Tzela
I did my PhD in cell biology a few years ago and I am seriously sceptical
about the Kickstarter campaign. There are too many questions and way too few
control experiments. What you can see about their preliminary research is the
rotation device and the pictures of the cells. From what I have learned during
my studies is that it is easy to kill cell cultures and it is difficult to
compare different cell lines. For example, most cells need a very controlled
environment (temperature, growth medium, pH, a specific amount of cells per
area and not too many or too few neighbouring cells etc.) This rotation device
appears to be at room temperature and creates a shear flow, which is enough to
kill most cell cultures. The picture they show is not helpful at all, as they
just show dying cells. As others stated: you need more control experiments.
One would be to keekp a bottle of cells in the machine, without rotation.
That's really cheap and easy to compare, which they did not. (not addressing
the issue that that's not real microgravity) I hope to find time later to find
their publications, until then I don't believe this to be real.

Edit: I cannot find anything that's even looking like research. News articles
all referring Chou, but nothing to show for it. No paper or data. Now it looks
even worse.

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z92
I thought any of these experiments are carried out on two sets of cells. One
normal and the other cancerous. Both exposed to the same test environment and
treatment -- shear in this case. And when they claim "70% of cancerous cells
died" they mean 70% more of the cancerous cells died than that of the normal
cells, where "more" is defined in some acceptable standard.

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Tzela
Yes, but it is not what they say or show. And as long as they don't publish
anything more you should be far more sceptical than those journalists were.

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lolc
So human cells first survive 3 gs during launch then zero gs before they come
back to good old g again. They live and multiply through all this, as long as
they stay inside the human.

Now somebody created a carousel and says extracted human cells die when put on
that carousel. Some pertinent questions were not addressed in the article:
Would the extracted cells live if not put on the carousel? Do other types of
extracted cells not die when put on it?

Instead of answering these simple question, they speculate about sending cell
cultures to space. Where it's even harder to control conditions. I expect
exactly nothing to come of it.

Edit: They have not tested in "microgravity". There is no single place on
earth where you can sustain microgravity. You'd have to move very very fast.
At which point you have other problems. What they do to cell cultures is move
them up and down while rotating them. This simulates microgravity in the sense
that "on average" the cell cultures experience zero-g in any one direction.
Actually the cultures are routinely accelerated above one g with added torque!

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tehsauce
I'm skeptical that this could really work, but imagine the breakthroughs that
would be ushered in for both medicine and space travel if it turned out that
zero gravity diminished cancer? It would be the best incentive by far humans
have ever had to develop space travel. And curing cancer at the same time!
Billions of dollars of research funds could be redirected for developing
rockets and we'd saving more lives than before! A wonderful narrative to a
science fiction eutopia at least :)

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mansoor_
Yep, 1-way tickets to explosive global warming.

~~~
adrianN
Vastly improved rocketry could also make things like a huge mirror to shade
the planet feasible.

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sincerely
There's no way that doesn't have a trillion higher-order effects.

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pcardoso
So, just like Contact (the movie), where Hadden lives his last days in space
to slow down his cancer.

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fsiefken
Exactly my thought, one of my favorite movies combining my love for
spirituality, wonder, science and technology.

R: Comrade Arroway... ...we have been expecting your call. One moment, please.

E: Mr. Hadden?

S: Doctor!

S: How kind of you to call.

E: Mr. Hadden, where are you?

S: The Russian government was kind enough to give me accommodations on Mir.

E: You're living on a space station?

S: It's quite simple, really. The low oxygen, zero gravity environment...
...is the only thing keeping the cancer from eating me alive. Actually, I
quite like it up here. My little room has one hell of a view. I want to show
you something.

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dylan604
2 of my favorite lines:

S: Wanna take a ride? and S: The first rule of government spending is build
two at twice the price.

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thegabriele
Oh boy

"Chou Collective Join our journey to help us find a cure to cancer and other
aging diseases by utilising the unique environment of space."

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-d...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-
diseases-in-space?lang=it)

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teekert
It's a shame that it is practically impossible to culture healthy cells the
way they probably cultured these cancer cells so there is not really a control
experiment.

But we know people (bags of healthy cell in their normal environment) don't
die in space and cancer cells (presumably they did the same experiment on
earth) keep growing in normal gravity. So what we can say is that the
combination of loosing their normal environment and gravity kills these cancer
cells (if they used cell lines those cells are hardly comparable to normal
cancer cells anymore by the way). It's interesting to find out why, but it's a
long way from saying that this finding will help cure cancer.

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Roark66
>It's a shame that it is practically impossible to culture healthy cells the
way they probably cultured these cancer cells so there is not really a control
experiment.

Why not? What is special about the way they culture those cells compared to a
non-cancerous cell culture? (genuinely asking)

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lalaland1125
Normal human cells intentionally try to avoid growing too much, especially in
weird environments (this is important for keeping things stable and
functioning). Cancer cells on the other hand are cancerous for the very reason
that those controls are broken. They will try to grow uncontrollably,
everywhere.

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nabla9
Stem cells are also affected.

Stem Cell Health and Tissue Regeneration in Microgravity
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235978/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235978/)

It seems that after few days in days in microgravity, human immune cells were
unable to differentiate into mature cells.

> Over the long-term, exposure to microgravity may cause severe deficits in
> mammalian stem cell-based tissue regenerative health, including,
> osteogenesis, hematopoiesis, and lymphopoeisis

>The lack of gravity in space is a major concern for stem cell and tissue
regenerative health during long-term spaceflight.

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aiphex
Would be curious to know more about this, maybe there is a sweet spot. One of
the big issues with cancer is not in eradicating the regular tumor cells but
detecting and killing the 'cancer stem cells'. These are a big cause of
recurrence.

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rolltiide
> "We want to see if it is actually microgravity that’s having an affect on
> the cell, or could it be other things in space — like solar radiation?" he
> said. But such an endeavor is no easy task, Chou points out.

Why would he say that after the on-planet microgravity experiment? There was
no solar radiation in his actual experiment where the cells died so why would
he entertain that? Someone else should entertain that totally different
experiment while he tries to gain support for expanding his experiment.

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_Microft
> "But what I really wanted to know was: is there something these cancers have
> in common? That's why I put them in the microgravity device."

What is this microgravity device? A quick web search was inconclusive.

Before anyone answers this, I would like to guess. Is it either real
levitation by (dia)magnetic levitation (when levitating a live frog was
possible years ago, levitating a tiny amount of cells in a desktop device
should be possible by now?) or maybe something that makes the effect of
gravity average out, e.g. floating clusters of cells in a fluid to reduce the
net force and maybe even rotate them (or let them rotate freely), so that
there is no longer a preferred direction in the cluster (which is what I guess
is what is important here)?

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_Microft
Rotation, it is. Thanks to thegabriele who posted a link to a page that
contains a short video of the device:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-d...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-
diseases-in-space)

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tehsauce
I see the gif! Too bad rotation is not at all the same as microgravity... Why
would they think going all the way to space would have any improvement over
their tumbling device?

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LegitShady
>We want to see if it is actually microgravity that’s having an affect on the
cell, or could it be other things in space — like solar radiation?" he said.
But such an endeavor is no easy task, Chou points out.

Wow. What a headline.

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gilbertmpanga12
That's what I was thinking as well. It maybe solar radiation or some other
stuff we haven't yet identified or hardly created an understanding of how they
affect cancer cells. Overall it's exciting stuff :)

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LegitShady
I would guess its nonsense clickbait hype personally.

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pif
> Cancer cells die in [whatever] conditions.

So what? There are plenty of [whatever]s that satisfy this statement.

The difficult part is how to create such conditions within the human body
_without_ affecting sane cells!

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freedrull
What is the control? Do cancer cells normally live if they are taken out of
the body?

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saiya-jin
Yes, look ie at HeLa cell line, continuously cultured cancer cells from
patient taken in 1951. Many labs around the world use them.

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wasdfff
You still have to immortalize the cell line. NIH3T3 cells were immortalized by
culture conditions. Others are immortalized with viral treatment. The end
result is the cell line is similar, but not the sams as the source. Take a
primary tumor out of a patient and culture it and it will slowly die over a
few days or weeks.

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zelienople
Nose cancer!!!? There's nose cancer?

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adrianN
This just shows again how much we need a permanent lab in microgravity.

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Kuinox
That would cost a lot of money. It should be an international project. Let's
call this International Space Station.

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virusduck
Fisher delivery drivers hate it!

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_nalply
Cannabinoids would probably be easier for people.

