A few years ago, I read an article that proved to me that aspirin had antifungal properties. This has always interested me because my father was told to take an aspirin daily to control his heart disease and it seemed to have,e worked. Now I know why. Today I read this interesting article from Malta (small island in the Mediterranean Sea) news and although it is a bit technical, the author is trying to explain why aspirin works to prevent cancer. The technicalities of this article mirror past scientific articles on why the toenail fungus drug Sporanox works for cancer patients. Since Sporanox and aspirin both have anticancer and antifungal properties, wouldn’t logic dictate that cancer is a fungal disease? Could it be that simple? Scientists currently do not believe this, but here we have more fuel that cancer has fungus roots.

Unearthing aspirin’s cancer-preventive mechanisms

The multi-faceted importance of aspirin in medicine. Photo: Gianluca Farrugia The well-known drug aspirin has, in recent years, attracted considerable research interest, in light of its promising cancer-preventive effects. Widely used to treat inflammatory pain (such as headaches) and prevent post-operative thrombosis in patients recovering from heart disease (due to its blood-thinning properties), aspirin has also been shown to lower the incidence of common bowel cancers by at least a third, if prescribed in small daily doses over the span of at least five years. Aspirin can lower cancer incidence partly by reducing inflammation and also by causing early-stage cancer cells to destroy themselves via programmed cell death, prior to tumor formation. 

The Germ That Causes Cancer This book expounds upon the role of fungus in cancer.  Most physicians are unaware that common antibiotics may contribute to cancer while drugs that kill fungus often help cancer patients.  This is an important book that has been reduced to a much easier read for the layperson.  It includes a chemotherapy nurses notes, the confessions of a chemotherapy drug salesman and a physicians account of what he would do if he were diagnosed with cancer.  Includes diets.

Our past work has already shown that in mutant yeast cells with low tolerance to oxygen-associated stress (much like early-stage cancer cells), aspirin causes numerous forms of critical damage to the cellular power-generators known as mitochondria, resulting in cell death. Our ongoing research, currently financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, through the R&I Technology Development Programme (Project R&I2015001), has underlined even further mechanisms of how aspirin causes the lethal operational shutdown of mitochondria in stressed yeast cells. Essentially, in these cells, aspirin halts production of a metabolic compound that is critical for energy production, and its transport to the mitochondria. Starved of this fuel compound, mitochondria can no longer operate to produce the energy needed for cell survival, consequently shutting down and causing cell death.

These findings reinforce the role of mitochondria as critical targets of aspirin in stressed yeast cells, but not in normal healthy cells, and suggest that aspirin may behave similarly in early-stage cancer cells. This should provide further insight into aspirin’s cancer-preventive mechanisms and contribute to the design of more effective cancer chemotherapies in the future.

References
Gianluca Farrugia is a post-doctoral researcher at both the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking and the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry, University of Malta. https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20180701/life-features/unearthing-aspirins-cancer-preventive-mechanisms.683287