“What do we mean by that?” , “Yeah, what do we mean by that?” Exact quotes or not, Soupy Sales and Fang come to mind.
Is it OK for an Active Surveillance (AS) Guy comment in non-AS forums?
A fair number of folks have questioned whether an AS guy should be posting in advanced prostate cancer (PC) blogs. After all, we are different, and the most obvious difference between me and the advanced PC guy is prostate containment. And what right do I have to post everywhere with only AS status? Does it matter that my PC tumor shrank 92% between MRI scans?
Just like separating AS and advanced PC, one might be open to separating me from the body of knowledge I have reviewed and reported out on. Maybe advanced PC bloggers would find my postings less objectionable if I restricted myself to the science as applied to advanced cases. To address that issue let’s review how University Research Science actually works.
How Does Research Science Actually Work?
Here is how University Research Science works, and how I learned to benefit from it. I feel I need to answer this three part question:
How does research science really work 1) in general, 2) focused on PC, and 3) restricted to advanced PC?
In General
In 2022, the US Government Funded $171 Billion for Research. I am familiar with the NHI and NSF funding. If this is projected out for 6 years, that’s 1 Trillion dollars of money spent. To be clear, new ideas predominately come out of research.
Why not scan the results of all this money spent for solutions when current medical solutions of cutting and irradiating reduces human functioning and has questionable curative results?
University Professors respond to NHI and NSF Request for Proposals (RFQs) with their proposals on how to potentially spend some of this money. These Grant Requests are substantial to create, and many different institutions vie for the same grant money. The winners have their proposals accepted, and then they carry out their research plan. They keep track of what they do, and then submit their results as either ‘papers’ or ‘manuscripts’ to various publications for proposed publication. It’s a “publish or perish” world for them. If no journal accepts their written document of results, or just a lower level publisher accepts it, those authors/researchers have a more difficult time winning in their next round of grant writing. Universities have in-house publishing journals for documents that can’t or didn’t get published elsewhere.
So, when I go to Google Scholar, put a request into the search bar, then hit ‘Enter’, what comes back is a list of these papers ordered by some criteria-oriented algorithm that I will say is “In order of importance”. This by no means defines an order of importance to any particular researcher. The researcher reviewing the search results must look through a lot of entries on the list, and decide for themselves which are relevant to their research, and which are not. It depends on the specifics of each paper. For more details on dicing out which may be important and which are not, see “How to Read A Research Paper”.
Focused on PC
Here for me, every search I make is “prostate cancer and x”, where x is the thing within the PC knowledge base I am currently trying to learn more about.
My early values of “x” were “psa doubling” and “increasing psa doubling times”, as I sought to slow down the time it took to have my psa score double. As I began to adopt various methods in the papers I was reading that claimed to increase psa doubling times, I eventually hit 3 months and another psa test. At that time, my new psa test was lower than my previous one and psa doubling analysis became more creative as I looked back into much earlier tests to find scores below the current one. Eventually, with the 3rd psa lowering score, I dropped below my first psa score from seven years ago, and psa doubling for me was no longer a thing. I needed a new goal.
Well before that 3rd reading, my attention turned to looking at the strategies I had adopted, and reinvestigating them. A second and third pass in each strategy improved my understanding of what was going on, and allowed me to improve each one’s effectiveness and/or cost. Sometimes new strategies emerged from the tangential information in a study.
Focused on Advanced PC
All that being said, I turn now to dealing with the issue of whatever I have been doing and its link to Advanced PC.
The one thing that comes to my mind when addressing this, and it’s that I read and see 3 and then 6 cancer cell types, called cell lines, that most research out there uses. for example, in Month 14 I focus on this graph:
A line of cancer is started with a sample of PC from one person in the past.
Three other new lines are also described below the original three lines.
So let’s look at the three major lines of research cancer, which I would say a lot of what I have researched is dependent upon. Then follows three more lines from experiments I decided were less important to my research, yet still exist and are used quite a bit.
- LNCaP: This cell line can be used to model different aspects of prostate cancer progression, such as hormone-dependent and castration-resistant cancer.
- PC-3: This cell line is useful for studying biochemical changes in advanced prostate cancer cells and how they respond to chemotherapy.
- DU-145: This cell line is also commonly used in prostate cancer research.
These next three are used in experimental models designed by transplanting cells from human prostate cancer cell lines into immunocompromised mice. Some examples of these models include:
- C4-2 is a derivative of LNCaP seen above
- 22Rv1 came from a patient with osseous metastases (PC spread to bones)
- LAPC-4 lymph node metastasis of a male patient with hormone refractory PC
All Six Cancer Cell Lines are Metastatic
As you can see from above, all six lines of cancer cells are metastatic ones. Much of my research has depended on them. Some have not, such human studies with flaxseed and other studies with men drinking pomegranate juice. And there are warnings from time to time that this or that research may not apply very well to gland-contained PC. I am an experiment of one that shows for me, the effectiveness of my strategies based on research with these metastatic cancer lines also works will with localized PC.
So from this one simple fact that all six Research PC cancer lines are metastatic, I draw the conclusion that the techniques and strategies I use are also effective on metastatic cancer, since my strategies are globally blood based and my blood circulates throughout in my body getting to most if not all cells eventually.
I benefited from University Research Science by studying it and creating my own custom plan. The plan has been successfully lowering my psa and reducing the size of my tumor and otherwise reducing the number of PC cells in my body, no matter where they may microscopically be.
Do you agree with this argument, or do you have a counter argument or any additional information you want to share? Please comment below, and have a great day.
© 2025, Patrick Murray, Manchester NJ. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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