Fat has signs of a tumor
A new evolutionary theory has emerged in Russia
A fundamentally new theory that can change the idea of traditional medicine about adipose tissue and oncological diseases has been proposed in Russia. Its author, head of the Research Laboratory of Theoretical Biology of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU), Professor Andrey Kozlov proved that adipose tissue has signs of a tumor, and tumors need progressive evolution.
– Andrey Petrovich, you are a supporter of the evolutionary approach to the sciences of health and diseases. What can this give to practical medicine?
– Evolution rarely intersects with medicine. For doctors, the most important thing is to save the patient's life, and scientists should think about where to move on. Evolutionary or Darwinian medicine emerged very late, at the end of the 20th century. It was found that many diseases of civilization are associated with a change in diet that occurred in humans 10 thousand years ago, when the domestication of plants and animals began. The diet of our ancestors – hunters and gatherers – has changed dramatically, hence many cardiovascular diseases, myopia, and so on.
Doctors, as a rule, are interested only in malignant tumors. But you and I are mammals, and 80 percent of mammalian tumors are benign. A significant portion of tumors never kill their host.
All multicellular organisms have tumors. Moreover, oncogenes are the oldest class of genes. And if this is the oldest class, it means that oncogenes were originally needed for something…
Tumors are inherited. Previously, it was thought that it was better not to talk about it, so as not to upset people. But in fact, inherited tumor syndromes are ten times more common than non-tumor hereditary syndromes. Evolution needs it.
Finally, the tumor has a number of properties that, if I were in the place of evolution, I would definitely use them. For example, tumors provide excess cell masses, activate unusual genes, and have a great morphological potential. In the early stages of progression, they become the source of origin of new tissues and organs.
– Could you give a concrete example when a tumor played an obvious role in the evolution of an individual organism?
– The simplest example is a goldfish with a cap. These fish have been selected by Chinese breeders for several hundred years. The symmetrical shape of the caps, their location in a certain place and their appearance at a certain stage of development – all these are signs of a normal organ. But in fact, the cap is nothing more than a tumor–like organ, which at an early stage of progression provided additional cell masses for the expression of evolutionarily new genes.
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CC BY-SA 4.0 / Lawrencekhoo / Orange Oranda with a white full faced cap (wen)/ Cropped image
– Does a person also have tumor-like organs?
– Placenta, mammary gland and prostate have many properties of tumors, including regulated invasiveness at certain stages of development. Note that these are evolutionarily the youngest organs, and the breast and prostate have the highest incidence of cancer and mortality from them in humans.
– Let's take the placenta, we all came out of it. What are the common features of the placenta and the tumor?
– There are many of them: invasion and metastasis of the trophoblast during implantation into the decidual membrane, aerobic glycolysis of the placental chorion, immunosuppression in the mother and many other signs. In fact, the placenta is a tumor, but only it is regulated.
– How do you technically study human oncogenes?
– More than two hundred oncogenes have already been described in humans. I predicted this number in a 1987 paper when only a dozen oncogenes were known. My laboratory has also described more than a hundred evolutionarily new human genes that work in tumors. There are huge opportunities for studying them now – supercomputers, databases, etc. Our laboratory uses a database that contains information about 20 thousand different samples of 33 different types of tumors.
– How did the theory of the evolutionary role of tumors lead you to the hypothesis that fat is a tumor–like organ, and obesity is a tumor-like process?
– Our idea of fat as something amorphous and poorly organized is not entirely correct. It turned out that a person has several types of fatty tissues – white fat, brown fat, etc. Together, these tissues take on certain functions – thermoregulation and energy metabolism.
Currently, adipose tissues are considered not just as tissues, but as a separate metabolic and endocrine organ acting as a structural whole (an organ is a structure that can be excised, consisting of at least two tissues and having a specific function – the fat organ meets all these requirements).
By all indications, a fat organ is an evolutionarily young organ, and if so, then it should have tumor signs. I started looking for these signs and found a huge number of them!
Common features of a fatty organ and tumors: unlimited expansion, reversible elasticity, induction of angiogenesis, chronic inflammation, hormone production, infiltration of other organs with their destruction, systemic effect on the body and many others.
The totality of these signs, which include most of the "main signs" of tumors, more than convincingly indicates that the fatty organ is a tumor-like organ along with the placenta, breast and prostate, and obesity is a tumor-like process.
– What do you think the scientific conclusions follow from this? And what practical benefit can there be from this?
– The main practical benefit is the use of approaches developed to combat obesity (fasting, low–calorie diet, keto diet, etc.) to fight tumors, and vice versa – the use of technologies developed for oncology (in particular, gene technologies) to combat obesity.
It is important to mention here that using the approaches mentioned above, we were able to describe a new gene network involved in the development of a fat organ. All the genes of this network, depending on the context, play the role of either oncogenes or tumor suppressors. Perhaps understanding such an antagonistic dualism will help in solving the cancer problem and the problem of obesity.
The new theory of the evolutionary role of tumors suggests that we need to try to "negotiate" with tumors, as it was in evolution, and not only strive to kill them. Tumor processes are essential processes, it is impossible to destroy them, but they can be stabilized. This is a fundamental change in the oncological paradigm, involving a radical revision of the strategy of prevention, therapy and diagnosis of tumors. Many oncologists have recently come to a similar conclusion.
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