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How to help your body help itself

In this exclusive excerpt from his new book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life, French psychiatrist and neuroscientist David Servan-Schreiber describes how he survived cancer with medical treatment and by boosting his immune system’s natural defenses through diet, exercise and a positive outlook on life.

David Servan-Schreiber | November 2008 issue

Once S180 cells are injected into a mouse, they reproduce so fast the tumor mass doubles every 10 hours. They invade the surrounding tissues and destroy everything they find along the way. Inside the abdominal cavity, their growth rapidly overwhelms the drainage capacity of the lymphatic system. Fluids, called ascites, build up in the abdomen, as in a clogged bathtub. These light-colored fluids provide an ideal environment for S180 cells to grow. They go on reproducing dangerously until a vital organ breaks down or a major blood vessel bursts, leading to death.

In his laboratory at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, Zheng Cui, professor of biology, didn’t study cancer, but the metabolism of fats. Antibodies were needed for his experiments, and to obtain them, the famous S180 cells were injected into mice. The injected cells provoked the production of ascites, so the antibodies could easily be extracted. None of the mice injected with several thousand S180 cells would survive more than a month, so this standard procedure required a continual renewal of “livestock.” Until the day when a strange event took place.

A young researcher, Liya Qin, had injected 200,000 S180 cells into a group of mice. It was the usual dose for this common procedure. But one of them, Mouse No. 6, had resisted the injection. It kept a resolutely flat abdomen. Liya repeated the shot unsuccessfully. On the advice of Zheng, who was supervising her research, she doubled the dose, still to no effect. She then injected 10 times the dose: 2 million cells. To her amazement, there was still neither cancer nor ascites in the recalcitrant mouse. Zheng began to doubt his assistant’s competence. He decided to give the injection himself. For good measure, he injected 20 million cells and made sure the liquid had penetrated the abdomen. Two weeks later, still nothing. He then tried 200 million cells—1,000 times the usual dose—to no avail.

No mouse had lived more than two months in this lab after being injected with the S180 cells. Mouse No. 6 was in its eighth month, despite the astronomical doses of cancer cells injected directly into its abdomen, where they typically reproduce the fastest. Zheng began to suspect they might have encountered the impossible—a mouse that was naturally resistant to cancer.

The growth of cancer is counteracted by poorly understood mechanisms. Over the last 10 years, some of these mechanisms have been brought to light and examined in the laboratory. Zheng’s Mouse No. 6 shed light on the first one: the power of the immune system when it’s totally mobilized.

Once convinced that the famous rodent—known as Mighty Mouse—was resistant to cancer, Zheng turned to a new concern. There was only one Mighty Mouse, and a mouse lives two years at most. Once it was dead, how could his extraordinary resistance be examined? And what if it caught a virus or pneumonia? Zheng thought about preserving his DNA or cloning him. The first successful mouse clones had just been announced. Then one of his colleagues asked, “Have you thought about breeding him?”

Not only did Mighty Mouse go on to have a family—with a normal, nonresistant female—but half its grandchildren inherited its resistance to S180 cells. Like their grandfather, these mice could take in and perfectly resist 2 million S180 cells, a dose that became fairly ordinary in the laboratory. They even tolerated 2 billion S180 cells, 10 percent of their total weight. This is the equivalent, in a human being, of injecting a 12- to 17-pound mass of an ultra-virulent tumor.

At one point, Zheng was away from the lab on sabbatical for several months. When he returned and resumed his experiments with the resistant mice, a serious disappointment was awaiting. Two weeks after the usual injection, the mice all developed cancerous ascites. What had happened? How had they lost their resistance during his absence?

For days he thought constantly about this setback and wondered what mistake he might have made. As most of his colleagues had suggested, perhaps the “discovery” was too good to be true. He was so disappointed he stopped going to see the mice. They were probably all dying, four weeks after the injections. When he eventually returned to the laboratory, heavy-hearted, he raised the cover of their cage and froze: The mice were unquestionably alive, and the swelling induced by the ascites had disappeared.

After several days of feverish experiments, the explanation emerged. At a certain age—six months for a mouse, the equivalent of 50 years for a human—the mechanism of resistance is weakened. At first, the cancer started to develop, which explained the abdomens swollen with ascites. But about two weeks later (one to two years on a human scale), the tumors’ presence eventually activated the mice’s resistance. The tumors melted away by the minute and vanished in less than 24 hours (one to two months on a human scale). The mice returned to their customary activities, including highly active sex lives. For the first time, science had an experimental model, reproducible on demand, of the spontaneous regression of cancer.

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