Malevolent Designer News - How Bacteria Help Cancers Spread

Evidence in mice that bacteria in tumors help cancer cells metastasize -- ScienceDaily

Creationist mode:

Creationism's beloved malevolence is never short of ideas for making life a little (or preferably a lot) more unpleasant in it's never-ending quest to increase the amount of suffering in the world.

For instance, as a group of research scientists have shown, not content with creating cancers, it has enlisted the help of the bacteria it also created to help spread the cancers once they take hold in a body. The bacteria travel inside the cancer cells as they circulate in the blood looking for somewhere else to start a new tumour, and help defend them against the mechanical stresses they encounter in the circulation.

The findings by Shang Cai of the Westlake Laboratory of Life Sciences and Biomedicine, Westlake University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China and colleagues was published yesterday in the journal Cell, sadly, behind an expensive paywall. However, the abstract is available here.

Creationist mode:

Our study reveals that the cancer cell's behavior is also controlled by the microbes hiding inside tumors, the majority of which were originally thought to be sterile. This microbial involvement is distinct from the genetic, epigenetic, and metabolic components that most cancer drugs target.

However, our study does not mean that using antibiotics during cancer treatment will benefit patients," he says. "Therefore, it is still an important scientific question of how to manage the intratumor bacteria to improve cancer treatment in the future.

Tumor cells hijacked by microbes could be more common than previously thought, which underscores the broad clinical value of understanding the exact role of the tumor-resident microbial community in cancer progression.

Shang Cai, senior author
Westlake Laboratory of Life Sciences and Biomedicine.
Westlake University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

Of course, being scientists and not religious fundamentalists who have inherited a primitive, Bronze Age superstition, they don't ascribe this to any form of design, intelligent or otherwise, and simply present the facts, because science doesn't try to fit the facts into pre-existing superstitions.

As information provided by Cell Press explains:

Microbes play a critical role in affecting cancer susceptibility and tumor progression, particularly in colorectal cancers. However, emerging evidence suggests that they are also integral components of the tumor tissue itself in in a broad range of cancer types, such as pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, and breast cancer. Microbial features are linked to cancer risk, prognosis, and treatment responses, yet the biological functions of tumor-resident microbes in tumor progression remain unclear.

Whether these microbes are passengers or drivers of tumor progression has been an intriguing question.

[…]

To address this gap, Cai and his collaborators used a mouse model of breast cancer with significant amounts of bacteria inside cells, similar to human breast cancer. They found that the microbes can travel through

We were surprised initially at the fact that such a low abundance of bacteria could exert such a crucial role in cancer metastasis. What is even more astonishing is that only one shot of bacteria injection into the breast tumor can cause a tumor that originally rarely metastasizes to start to metastasize. Intracellular microbiota could be a potential target for preventing metastasis in broad cancer types at an early stage, which is much better than to have to treat it later on.

Shang Cai

the circulatory system with the cancer cells and play critical roles in tumor metastasis. Specifically, these passenger bacteria are able to modulate the cellular actin network and promoted cell survival against mechanical stress in circulation.

Although the study revealed a clear role of intratumor bacteria in promoting cancer cell metastatic colonization, the authors did not exclude the possibility that the gut microbiome and immune system may act together with intratumor bacteria to determine cancer progression. In the future, further in-depth analysis of how bacteria invade tumor cells, how intracellular bacteria are integrated into the host cell system, and how bacteria-containing tumor cells interact with the immune system will provide insights on how to properly implement antibiotics for cancer therapeutics in the clinic.

The problem for creationists is that, whilst it is easy to fool scientifically illiterate simpletons that intelligent design is a logical explanation for the appearance of design in nature, as creationist frauds daily demonstrate, what is not easy for them to explain is just why any intelligent designer of things like bacteria being co-opted to make metastasising cancer cells more likely to survive and establish new tumours, should be regarded as something worth worshipping.

Nor is it easy to explain why those same frauds consider it more important that their supposedly omnibenevolent god be regarded as a malevolent sadist than it is to accept that science is right and evolution by natural selection is the best explanation for both the appearance of design and the presence of seemingly malevolent things like cancers and parasites, neither of which could conceivably be the work of an all-loving creator god.

The explanation must be that the political interests of these frauds is best served by trying to destroy people's trust in the scientific method as the best available tool for understanding the world. So, what is it about the truth that science reveals that these charlatans find most threatening?

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link