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Cancer-busting broccoli sprout pills? It’s a thing.
Translational scientist’s ‘green chemoprevention’ research extends from eastern China to Seattle and now, into space
July 19, 2021 • By Diane Mapes / Fred Hutch News Service
Worried about health effects from the U.S.’s increasingly smoky summers? One day, not far in the future, you may be able to pop a few pills that will help your cells pinpoint and extract the worst of the airborne carcinogens before they can do any harm.
Sound completely science-fictional? It gets better. Future space travelers bound for Mars may take these chemopreventive — or cancer-fighting — agents as well, to combat the adverse effects of galactic cosmic rays and other harmful space radiation.
For decades, Dr. Thomas Kensler has been on a quest to find a way to exploit a powerful cancer-inhibiting process that’s triggered when you eat cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and most especially, broccoli sprouts. The toxicologist and translational researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and his colleagues are basically trying to one-up Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who advised humans to “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
“I’ve been trying to address this question for about 25 years,” said the researcher, recently selected as one of a handful of "champions and changemakers" by the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Prevention. “Can people be protected from unavoidable exposures to environmental carcinogens by increasing their rates of detoxications and facilitating the elimination of these carcinogens from our body?”
The answer is yes. Meet your favorite new cancer prevention tool: broccoli pills...
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But the data still needs to be analyzed. Kensler had planned to go back to China to retrieve blood samples in early 2020 in order to evaluate the biomarkers. The pandemic had other plans.
“We wanted to clearly define the pharmacological activity,” he said. “We want to do metabolomics and proteomics and analytic measures that will give us insights into the mechanism of action and efficacy of action. But they’re sitting in a minus 80-degree freezer in Qidong.”
Kensler has asked for permission from China and the U.S. to return and retrieve the samples, but so far has not received all necessary clearances, mostly due to the pandemic.
“We don’t really know about the future of the studies,” he said. “It’s complicated scientifically, politically and public health-wise. But we have samples and we continue to think about it and what we want to accomplish.”...
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