#422 Cancer Biologist Shares the Science of Cancer Prevention - Dr Joe Zundell PhD

Joe Zundell (0:00)

Minimizing muscle wasting is integral for the survival of cancer patients. I will say this with a strong degree of confidence that if cancers are caught in early stages, they are very treatable to the point of complete remission. But the problem with a lot of cancers...

Siim Land (0:16)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Joe Zundell. Joe has a PhD in cancer biology. In this episode, we go through some of the fundamentals of cancer biology and prevention. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Zundell (0:32)

Thanks for having me, Siim. I really appreciate it.

Siim Land (0:35)

Yeah, I really enjoy your content on Instagram about cancer, and it's very educational for people who don't really understand the physiology and what is cancer. So yeah, I'm really excited to talk with you. So maybe we can start with giving a brief overview of what is cancer, and why is it so lethal? Why is it one of the leading causes of death in the world, in developed countries?

Joe Zundell (1:04)

Yeah. So typically when I try and describe cancer to people, I typically just try and keep it as basic as possible. So what I tell people is that cancer is a disease that comes about when you have loss of checkpoints that normally keep cells in check because they are checkpoints. And there's a lot of things that can obviously correct for things like DNA division and immune cell recognition of abnormal cells. And it's when we lose our ability to detect these events that enables continuous growth and cancer cell generation and progression, if not corrected. Our bodies are always going through this mechanistically of, you know, checking each cell for its integrity. And in normal context, you know, things that look abnormal are quickly eradicated by very programmed mechanisms, like programmed cell death, as an example. If something looks weird, the cell will be programmed to die via a process called apoptosis, or apoptosis, as many people like to say.

So, I mean, those are typically mechanisms which, you know, can induce cancers later on. And as to why maybe you've seen that it's increasing in prevalence and why it's a very common disease and in some cases, very lethal, there's a variety of different reasons for that, depending on the type of cancer. And actually, more and more cancers are becoming increasingly more treatable, given to technological advances. Within even the past 20 to 30 years, we have significantly greater treatment options now. So despite cancer incidence increasing for things like colorectal cancers, which we can touch on, things like pancreatic cancers, esophageal cancers, and even lung cancers, many cancers, despite having great incidence like breast cancer, have extremely great survival rates within 95 percent, five-year survival rates because of the treatments that we've developed. So it's always contextual, right? And so a lot of it depends on our environment. There are rare genetic heritable events that we can touch on, but I think I've rambled enough on this question to give people enough to think about.

Siim Land (3:22)

Yeah. So it kind of is a failure of the immune system to eliminate the cancer.

Joe Zundell (3:28)

In one way, yeah.

Siim Land (3:29)

Yeah.

Joe Zundell (3:30)

One of many ways, yeah.

Siim Land (3:32)

And there's obviously like different thresholds where it occurs, and I guess people have different amounts of these mutations that occur, depending on genetics and environment and lifestyle, that create the situation where the cancer can develop and bypass the checkpoint. Sure.

Joe Zundell (3:51)

And I want to emphasize and try to make this as clear as possible. Sometimes, and very often, you don't need either heritable mutations to induce a physical change which can lead to cancers. So a lot of my work has focused on the study of epigenetics. And so sometimes you can have spontaneous things that even independent of mutation, which may even lead to mutation later on, independent of mutation can induce cancers. So there's these spontaneous events that can sometimes lead to genetic events. And I think that people need to understand that as well.

Siim Land (4:28)

Right. One thing that many people have heard is that you have cancer all the time and it's just that at some point you get it or something. So what is the actual case here?

Joe Zundell (4:39)

Yeah. So that's one of those phrases that I've actively tried to correct.

because it's not accurate. And I think people in general have this misunderstanding that just because our bodies are always going through these checkpoints to regulate the level of abnormalities and the level of imperfections that naturally occur in our bodies, that's not the same thing as having cancer. Our bodies are actively doing things because it's a very integral part of normal cell biology to be able to have these checkpoints. But it's very, very different to have checkpoints than it is to have cancer. Cancer is loss of regulation of these checkpoints. So despite our bodies regulating our normal cell biology to maintain balance within our bodies, that's very different from actually having cancer because in cancer you lose those abilities because otherwise it wouldn't be cancer. So just to keep it simple, no, we don't all have cancer cells in our body. And I've actually made a pretty in-depth video just talking about this from a cell cycle regulatory perspective because the checkpoints that regulate DNA repair are very tightly regulated, and there's many of them. So I made a YouTube video which describes that in depth that people can check out after this video.