Brandon Wayman Biol 1615-018-F13 11/5/13

Soy Isoflavones Radiosensitize Lung Cancer While Mitigating Normal Tissue Injury

Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer in the world and kills more than the next four most harmful cancers (colon, breast, pancreas, and prostate) combined. Those who are diagnosed with lung cancer are given a five year survival rate of 16.3% which is extremely low especially when compared to breast cancer at 90.0%. The strange part is that 150 years ago the chances of your cancer being located in your lungs was around 1% and was considered a rare disease. But due to the worlds fascination with smoking cigarettes, this disease has become a huge impact on our society. So how do we go about treating all of these victims of lung cancer? Current treatment goes as follows: you have the option of chemotherapy, radiation therapy or both. Studies have shown that doing both therapies at the same time is more effective than doing one alone or doing them one after the other. But as the facts show above, more effective is a 5 year survival rate of 16.3%, which is pretty scary. This is partially due to the fact that the lung tissue is one of our most fragile tissues, and when put under the stress of radiation tends to scare up which results in poor breathing and quality of life. The other reason why lung cancer is so hard to treat is because once diagnosed the cancer tends to grow rapidly and tumors are not easily centralized. With lung cancer being major harm to the world and with such a large distance to improve treatment, lung cancer researchers have turned to a little green bean you can find with your sushi dinner.

Yes, soy beans are our answer. Researchers have looked in to the diets of cancer patients around the world and found that those with a high soy diet were better off when it came to their bodies fight against cancer. Further research has gone on with soy beans and found that it is the soy isoflavones which are the hormones in the bean that are directly involved in treating cancer. This is where the National Institutes of health stepped in and researched and wrote the article Soy Isoflavones Radiosensitize Lung Cancer While Mitigating Normal Tissue Injury. They predicted that the soy isoflavones would harm the cancer cells while keeping normal lung cells safe. Their process is as follows. First they cultured the lung cancer cells and injected them in to mice. Mice were split in to four groups: treated with vehicle only (control), soy alone, left lung irradiation alone or with soy combined with left lung irradiation. They secluded the left lung to radiation treatment so that the right lung in all of mice would represent the effects of no radiation therapy. Through trial and sacrifice of mice they found that around day 20 tumors were of good size to begin the treated with the soy isoflavones for three days. Then, the left lung was selectively irradiated with 12 Gy in all mice daily for four weeks. Soy treatment was continued on a daily basis for 4 more weeks. On day 49 the experiment was ended in order to compare the tumors of all groups before the large tumors of the untreated mice died from burden of the tumor. The experiment was repeated twice. And here were their findings: the control mice had large tumors, the soy only mice had slightly smaller but basically the same size tumors as the control, the radiation treated mice had much smaller and less tumors but also had lung damage to non-tumor cells, and the mice that had been fed soy isoflavones and had radiation treatment had a very small amount of small tumors and a minimal amount of damage to surrounding non-cancer cells.

They concluded that soy isoflavones can be shown to not only complement and further assist in the destruction of lung cancer cells, but also reduced inflammation and damage to surrounding lung cells. Soy could be used as a non-toxic complementary approach to improve radiation therapy for lung cancer. This is a huge step in the treatment of the most detrimental cancer in the world. It is especially useful in situations where the lungs are highly fragile such as 90% of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes. Research has a long way to go before anyone is curing cancer, but with great findings like the effects of soy with lung cancer, we are definitely on the right track.