#465 Science-Backed Ways to Lower Cancer Risk (with a Cancer Biologist) - Dr Joe Zundell

Joe Zundell (0:00)

In early cancer research, we've focused on achieving the largest appropriate dose without significantly observed toxicities, but now we're finding that often less is more. In general, you give a lot lower of a dose for a longer period of time, and that sometimes, based on the research that's available right now, has often a more potent biological effect than just giving a larger dose of the same treatment.

Siim Land (0:27)

Joe, welcome back to the show.

Joe Zundell (0:29)

Hey, Siim, how's it going? Thanks for having me.

Siim Land (0:31)

Yeah, I'm excited to have you back. And for those of you who don't know, then Joe and I did our first podcast last year, where we discussed the main fundamentals of cancer biology. How does it work? What are some of the things you can do to prevent cancer and reduce the risk of developing cancer? But there's obviously a lot of questions that were left unanswered because cancer is a super complex topic. And yeah, that's why I decided to have you back. And I actually let my audience ask you some questions. So we'll go through some questions that they had. But before we get to that, the first podcast we had was not one year ago, but let's say 10 months ago. Have there been any new insights in cancer research that you've come across, or has there been any changes in your own way of thinking about cancer and cancer prevention?

Joe Zundell (1:27)

I mean, cancer research is an ever-growing field, so there's always things we learn even on a regular daily basis. From an advanced therapeutic perspective, there's obviously been a lot of advances when it comes to immunotherapies, which are types of therapies that can basically make your immune system stronger or more capable to recognize tumors. And I think we touched on that briefly in the first, the part one of our discussion here.

But more so in an area that I am focused on regularly, because it's my job, essentially, is targeted radiotherapy. So my company that I work for specifically, we attach radioactive isotopes to basically these small proteins that we designed to bind to a specific thing on cancer, and that's not present on normal cells, to basically deliver a radioactive missile or nuclear warhead directly to the site of a tumor, as opposed to systemic radiation. So there's been a lot of advancements in terms of developing radiotherapies to be targeted in my specific area, and a lot of therapies are in clinical trials right now to target various bladder cancer subtypes, liver cancer subtypes, and let's see, breast cancer subtypes as well, and also some lung cancer types for targeted radiotherapy. But another type of immunotherapy kind of is, it's called an ADC. So it's an ADC type therapy where you basically have an antibody that is attached to or chemically linked to, instead of like a radioactive isotope, it's chemically linked to a chemotherapeutic. So it's another way of delivering a targeted chemotherapeutic directly to a tumor site, kind of like the way that we would use targeted radiotherapy. So those are some advancing fields that I think are pretty important to pay attention to. So if people want to dig more into ADC type therapies, that's ADC type therapies, or targeted radiotherapy, I would advise that they look into that. And obviously, we can have a part 3 through 100 to discuss the various nuance to be discussed here. But those are some promising fields that I think people should look into.

Siim Land (3:47)

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned the radiotherapy a few months ago, I stumbled across this boron-neutron capture therapy, which essentially is also you ingest this boron tin that's, I guess, also allows neutrons to hit it. So the boron tin migrates to the cancer cells, and then you have some high-energy particles targeting that tumor, which also works like a nuclear bomb in your body that targets the cancer cells.

Joe Zundell (4:19)

You'll have to send me that information because I'm not familiar with that specific type of therapy, but I'd be very curious to read about it.

Siim Land (4:27)

It's a huge field. Yeah, it was a new paper, I think, a few months ago that I found. But you also mentioned this immunotherapy, which over the last few months or years, there's been some of these insights that the timing of when you do chemotherapy or when you administer chemotherapy appears to have pretty big effect on the outcomes and the effectiveness of the chemotherapy through the circadian rhythm regulations. So like the timing of when you actually, quote unquote, do cancer therapeutics appears to matter as well.