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    Since the 1970s, researchers have been interested in the therapeutic potential of vitamin C for the treatment of cancer. Now, research developed by scientists at the Perlmutter Cancer Center at the University of New York (USA) shows how vitamin C can prevent the leukemia stem cells from multiplying, and thus block their progression.

    It is already known that an enzyme called Tet methylcytosine dioxygenase 2 (TET2) has the ability to produce stem cells, undifferentiated cells that have not yet gained a specific identity and function, a circumstance that can be used for patients with leukemia, since in Instead of maturing and dying like any other cell, they regenerate and multiply infinitely, hence the organism is unable to produce normal white blood cells, which our immune system needs to fight infection.


    According to experts, 50% of patients who have chronic myelomonocytic leukemia also have a genetic malfunction that reduces TET2, hence they focused on finding out how this enzyme could be genetically stimulated and whether vitamin C would play an important role or do not.



    Activation and deactivation of the TET2 gene

    The researchers used mice genetically modified to lack this enzyme and designed mouse models with the possibility of "turning on" and "turning off" the TET2 gene by optogenetics. By shutting down this gene, experts discovered that the stem cells began to malfunction. When activating the gene, this dysfunction was reversed.

    In leukemia and other blood diseases that depend on TET2, only one of the copies of the gene is altered.

    When trying to administer a high dose of vitamin C intravenously to modified rodents, they found that vitamin C promoted a genetic mechanism (DNA demethylation) that restored TET2 function; that is, the defective copy of the gene was compensated by amplifying the action of the copy that does work normally in the TET2 gene.

    The study undoubtedly confirmed the hypothesis of the researchers. By promoting the demethylation of DNA, vitamin C "told" stem cells to mature and die. Not only that. The treatment also stopped the leukemia cancer cells that had been transplanted from human patients to growing mice.

    Combining the therapeutic potential of vitamin C with anticancer drugs - inhibitors of PARP -, the efficacy of vitamin C treatment was enhanced, making it even more difficult for leukemic stem cells to reproduce.

    "Our results suggest that the high dose of vitamin C - and it is important to keep in mind that this means that the doses to be administered intravenously - could have therapeutic benefits in the myelodysplastic mutant TET2 syndrome", explains Benjamin Neel, co-author of the paper.

    "We also plan additional preclinical studies to test the effects of high doses of vitamin C in combination with PARP [inhibitors] in more models of acute myeloid leukemia and in samples from primary patients," concludes Neel.