A few weeks ago, I read (at Longecity, I think) about a new anti-cancer strategy. It was based on the idea that cancer cells have a higher metabolism than normal cells, and create more ROS. If you inhibit natural antioxidant defenses (e.g. SOD, etc) then cancer cells will be harmed more than normal cells. I think the compound they were looking at as the inhibitor was berberine, but I might be mis-remembering that. I've looked around for the post, or paper, or whatever it was, and haven't found it. If anyone remembers what this was, please post a link.
At any rate, this got me thinking: What if C60, a potent antioxidant, were therefore a pro-cancer agent? What do we know about the relationship between C60 and cancer? We know via Anthony's interview of Fathi Moussa that Baati's rats had no tumors at the end of their very long lives. We also saw that one of AgeVivo's mice, started on c60-oo in middle age, died several months later with a large tumor that appeared to be on the surface of a lung. The general assumption is that AgeVivo's mouse already had the tumor before it was given c60-oo, and that c60-oo didn't kill the tumor. Could c60-oo have accelerated the growth of the tumor via an antioxidant mechanism? That is my hypothetical concern.
Why would this be a problem for daily dosing, but less of a problem for intermittent dosing? When a cancer cell divides, the c60 content of the daughter cells will probably be split into two pools, perhaps of equal size, perhaps not. After several splits, the c60 content of most daughter cells should fall below the effective level, and the cells will again be susceptible to oxidative stress. With intermittent dosing, there will be a period where the daughter cells are relatively free of c60 and more susceptible to apoptosis. With daily dosing, the cancer cells would constantly be given a new dose of c60.
There is probably an optimal dosing schedule for avoiding this hypothetical risk. The dose should be large enough to allow enough time between doses for daughter cells from the tumor to lose enough c60 to be injured by their own ROS. At the same time, we don't want it to be so high that cells are overloaded, and daughter cells continue to have an effective dose even after a number of doublings.
From my muscle fatigue experiment (here, also see first post of thread), it appeared that a total dose of 0.09mg/kg was enough to provide good ROS coverage for a week. That suggests that 0.36mg/kg would be a reasonable monthly dose. I don't know that the assumption of linearity is valid here, but it's a starting point. The doubling time of different cancers is going to be highly variable; we would mainly be concerned with rapidly dividing cells. The faster a cell divides, the faster it loses C60.
At the moment, I'm leaning toward something like 0.36mg/kg per month as my own dose, but that's not cast in stone. Thoughts?