Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, UK’s integrative cancer care charity. And if you’re wondering what that means, well, it’s cancer care that addresses all the needs of people as far as possible, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.

Robin Daly
It’s a leave no stone unturned approach that’s prepared to consider any and every Ave. to healing in the best interest of those with cancer. A good way to sum up the approach that we advocat at yes to life is with the strap line for our charter of oncology, which is love as the guiding principle for cancer care.

Robin Daly
And you haven’t seen our charter, which is calling for a very different approach to cancer care. And take a look by visiting our website. That’s Yes to life.org.uk, scrolling down the home page a little and then following the links to the charter.

Robin Daly
As part of Yes to Life’s 20th anniversary, we’re focusing on particular topics within integrative cancer care each month. And this month the spotlight is on a couple of things, one of which is repurposed drugs.

Robin Daly
Nowadays, you don’t have to look far outside the box of conventional care to stumble on repurposed drugs, but that wasn’t the case until relatively recently. And the person we can attribute that to is Jane McLelland.

Robin Daly
Jane is what is called an extraordinary survivor, which means her life should have been cut short many, many years ago by terminal cancer. The fact that she’s very much here to tell the tale is down to her research into the potential for a combination of old drugs developed for other purposes and natural products.

Robin Daly
Hi, Jane, Great to have you back on the Yes to Life Show.

Jane McLelland
Hi Robin, always a pleasure to talk to you.

Robin Daly
Do you realise the last time you and my guest was in 2021, more than three years ago? So let’s just say it’s been too long. But meanwhile, we have worked together on a fantastic event this past autumn called The Repurposing Revolution, which you and Doctor Michael Castro delivered here in London and internationally online.

Robin Daly
And if anyone’s unable to attend, there is a recording of it available from the Yes Life shop at YES to life.shop.org. So the concept of repurposing is almost well known amongst people with cancer. I say almost as that really applies to those with the courage to look outside the box.

Robin Daly
Tragically, your oncologist is still very unlikely to be telling you anything at all about repurposing. But the familiarity they’ve gained can, I think, be almost entirely attributed to you and your book How to Starve Cancer.

Robin Daly
In fact, I think to a lot of people you appear to have invented repurposing. But of course, actually you took on an existing route of knowledge, and then you expanded and developed on that to an enormous degree.

Robin Daly
So I wonder if you start out by telling us about the very beginnings when you first got the idea of doing this yourself, how did that happen?

Jane McLelland
Yeah, well, I was running out of options at that point. I’d tried pretty much everything that I thought was complementary. I’d already had a lot of chemo, a lot of radiotherapy, and I didn’t want to have more of those because it had caused a problem in my bone marrow.

Jane McLelland
I then, you know, I had a deleted P53 that suddenly emerged. I had all sorts of markers which were going haywire, something called PKM 2 which measures glycolysis in, in, in your cells. And also I had MMPS.

Jane McLelland
These are sort of growth factors which had gone off the scale as well. So there are a lot of things that were going wrong and the prognosis was looking pretty poor. I already had stage 4 at this point, so I was a bit desperate.

Jane McLelland
I knew that I was heading off into a bad territory. So I, I, I’ve done a lot of intravenous vitamin C. I’d done a lot of, you know, I already had lots of supplements and things that I was taking. I had actually dropped my markers way down by using intravenous vitamin C, but they bounced back up again.

Jane McLelland
And I wasn’t sure at the time what I’d done. But I think because I was doing a parasite cleanse and things like that, I think I’d actually probably done a bit of feroptosis because I’d use artemisinin in combination with vitamin C and some other things as well.

Jane McLelland
But that obviously I didn’t know that at the time. And I probably would have done a bit more intravenous vitamin C and maybe use that kind of combination again. But I was at a point where I was really struggling to know what to do next.

Jane McLelland
And I had already read some of these articles and I’d kind of kept a folder on them. And so I dug them out and thought, right, I’m going to have to go for this. I’m going to have to look at these old drugs.

Jane McLelland
One of them was dipridamole, which, you know, the research went back to the 1980s. So running off to Doctor Callebout, who sadly is no longer with us. Fantastic, integrative Dr. He was. He was very happy to prescribe that for me and I went back to my oncologist.

Jane McLelland
I gave her some research on the combination of a statin and a non steroidal anti-inflammatory. The one specifically used in the article was Etodolac. Now that is normally used for arthritis and statins are normally used for cholesterol, but the combination of the two showed that there was an increased cancer kill for, specifically for cervical cancer, but other cancers as well.

Jane McLelland
So I thought, well, that’s probably a really good combo to add in. And then I, so it was, it was just a sort of a gradual process of adding these things in. I I had berberine but later I went and got myself some Metformin semetadine I use which is used to be over the counter in the UK for gastric ulcers.

Jane McLelland
You can get it elsewhere in Europe. But this was something else that I could see was going to help my immune system back then. I didn’t know, but I’ve since been diagnosed, probably since we last chattered.

Jane McLelland
I’ve been diagnosed. I think it’s 2020. I was diagnosed actually with cystic fibrosis, weird genetic mutations that I have, not your common genetic mutations. But I was really worried about my immune system.

Jane McLelland
So the simetidine was to try and boost my immune system. And actually what it did with the cancer is help switch the balance between something called your TH1 and TH2, which is your ability to kill your cancer cells or otherwise you have more of a human response and allergy kind of response.

Jane McLelland
You need to switch it back to killing the cancer cells. And this is what the semetidine did. So it was a combination of a few things and it was actually the cocktail that was key for me. It wasn’t just taking these things individually.

Jane McLelland
I had this concept that I was gradually adding thing, layering things in that would synergise with each other. So to start, to begin with, I knew that the lovastatin and the non steroidal would have a five times multiplying effect.

Jane McLelland
So I also knew that the dipridamol and the statin would also synergise. So that I thought would maybe boost the cocktail a bit more. And actually what happened was I got rid of the cancer, but I didn’t expect that at all that that was.

Robin Daly
And no surprise.

Jane McLelland
Very nice bonus. Thank you very much.

Robin Daly
That sort of cocktail thing is that’s where it all began really, the idea of just adding in bits and pieces.

Jane McLelland
It’s it’s the synergy, which I think is important, that people need to understand. There are particular combinations that work especially well. And that was something I talked about in the talk Yes to Life was something called synthetic lethality and this is the ability of two pathways on my metro map to really synergize well and stimulate cancer cell death if you like.

Jane McLelland
So that’s that’s that’s keys to understand which which pathways really work together well.

Robin Daly
Yeah. So when I talk about the fact that you developed this arcs to an enormous degree, it’s really in that area because prior to that, there were a few pioneers already saving or extending their own lives, sometimes with a single drug.

Robin Daly
And they were doing their best to tell the world, but of course they weren’t listening generally. Maybe you read of some of them at the time, but I think the kind of complexity of bringing these things together and building up a program in this way is the thing that is unique to you that you’ve actually done at this time.

Jane McLelland
I wasn’t aware of anybody else using these old drugs except that they had been given so full Melanoma, for example, the diaprimal had been given to stage 4 cancer patients at Saint Helier Hospital. And what happened was that these cancer patients were surviving.

Jane McLelland
And you know, that’s so. It was all serendipity, if you like.

Robin Daly
Exactly. That’s, that’s the sort of thing that, you know, I’ve read about as well as that you give a, a drug for one purpose, trying to help them with one problem. And you notice three years later that population isn’t getting cancer.

Robin Daly
It’s kind of like, well, why not? And so, yeah, it’s, it’s funny the way that the information has been generated in this kind of backhanded way, but it’s there, Yeah.

Jane McLelland
Yeah, and the and the same thing for for mebendazole actually, because they were just trying to get rid of parasites in mice. They came OK yeah, various antique cancer drugs and then giving them the mebendazole showed orphenbendazole, I think it was actually because it’s a veterinarian drug.

Jane McLelland
So they gave that to begin with. And then hey presto, will they the cancer, the gliomas that they had disappeared. So again, you know.

Robin Daly
Messed up their trial.

Jane McLelland
Yeah, but Gregory Riggins is all over that now. And, you know, he’s the researcher in in Boston who who discovered that. So he’s, that’s, I mean, Mabenazole is fantastic and he uses that for kids with brain cancer.

Jane McLelland
So that’s, that’s a really important thing because I think the ability to get drugs for children is really limited. And that’s one thing that really worries me is that we, we kind of can treat ourselves if we’re over 18.

Jane McLelland
We can get all sorts of things through various means. I have a list of doctors on my website. But if you are underage, if you like, for getting some of these things, it’s very hard to find somebody who will prescribe anything for you.

Jane McLelland
There seems to be, you know, it’s the rules. I I don’t know. There are specific rules, but I think doctors are more wary about that than forgiving.

Robin Daly
Definitely, definitely. It doesn’t just apply to the drugs. It’s right across the board and it’s because of the fact that the person themselves can’t give their own consent legally. So it’s the parents who are doing it.

Robin Daly
So it’s sort of third party and at the end of the day, I mean if you look at the relationship between the NHS and a child, for example, if they have a life threatening disease, then the NHS can actually make all the decisions about what happens to that child against the wishes of the parent that they want to.

Robin Daly
So yeah, it isn’t great, but that’s how it is. And of course, this is a very thorny legal area that lots of practitioners are very wary of, understandably. But who suffers? Well, the children. They don’t have any access to all sorts of potentially helpful things.

Robin Daly
So look, in today’s show, I don’t want to make any assumptions about what our listeners know already. And I want to take someone who knows nothing about repurchasing along with us on the journey. So an obvious question someone might have at the outfit as well.

Robin Daly
Here are these drugs, they’re out there already. They’re relatively safe. They can really help. Given the number of people dying from cancer, why wouldn’t oncologists be over the moon about that? And why wouldn’t the drug companies be shouting about the amazing breakthrough use for their drugs in the tabloids?

Jane McLelland
Well, obviously, you know, the, the, the latter part of that question with the big pharma is quite obvious. A lot of these things have actually reached their patent, the end of their patents. So you have a lot of generics available out there which are produced by Indian pharmaceutical companies or you know, all over the world, much cheaper.

Jane McLelland
And of course they enter into the market huge competition for these big companies. So they try and extend the shelf life of these patents. They try and you know, tweak them a little bit to give them an extra few years.

Jane McLelland
But ultimately that we are reaching what’s known as a patent Cliff and a lot of the old, you know, atorvastatin is off patent. All of the the what I deemed to be the sort of the top off label drugs at the moment for cancer that I can see the ones that really hit some of these metabolic pathways, the the feeding roots, the nutrient feeding roots of cancer all seem to be of patent now.

Jane McLelland
So that’s, that’s, that’s clearly nice to you, right? Yeah.

Robin Daly
That would be the difference between the way if you’re talking about one patient potential money making difference of like maybe 10s of thousands of pounds and a few quid basically.

Jane McLelland
Is that right? And the problem with that is that big farmers sort of are obsessed and they try and drum in to the doctors the need for randomized clinical trials and that they shouldn’t be giving anything unless a randomized clinical trial shows it’s better than another drug or shows it’s, you know, but of course we don’t have that with some of these old drugs unless they are using them in combination with a new drug.

Jane McLelland
So there’s a new mab which is coming out. A mab is a sort of a monoclonal antibody, which is an immunotherapy drug. So there’s one that they are bringing out for, for triple negative breast cancer. And they are using it in combination with either mectin, which shows that it works an awful lot better.

Jane McLelland
So they’ve already gone for looking at the combination to try and steal a March on some of the other drugs out there by saying, yeah, well look at the results. It’s so much better with my drug plus the, you know, the ivermectin just to increase the response rate that they get with patients.

Jane McLelland
And a good thing if the big pharma actually cottoned on to this a little bit more that, you know, this is a good way to try and drive new sales by actually doing combination trials, so.

Robin Daly
They’re capitalising on the effectiveness of out of patent drugs to make the new drugs more effective.

Jane McLelland
Yeah, and it’s all about synergy. It’s all about, you know, that’s, that’s what I try and educate people. It’s not about alternative methods. This is a way of making traditional conventional drugs work more effectively.

Jane McLelland
And this is the message that seems to be lost on the doctors and the oncologists. They all sold the idea that I’m alternative, which I am. I wouldn’t say I’m, I’m, I walk that middle path between what is known as, you know, alternative and the conventional path.

Jane McLelland
But I’m trying to link them together and say we need better effects with better combinations, better synergies and we need to look at drugs that will actually improve the efficacy of what you’re using.

Jane McLelland
Stop resistance. It’s all about stopping resistance in a lot of these drugs. And that’s something that I talk about a lot because my metro map really is to look at pathways that get active up regulated.

Jane McLelland
When you when you take a drug, there is always a pathway that increases which raises the risk of the cancer switching and using a different path. So it’s not necessarily stop using that drug, it’s you need to use a combination to make it more effective or just to stop that resistance.

Robin Daly
Yeah, it’s a big issue. So it’s pretty straightforward to see why the drug companies wouldn’t be interested simply on business grounds. But when it comes to oncologists is where you, you and people like you start to be labeled as conspiracy theorist for even asking the questions.

Robin Daly
The classic line we hear all the time is, well, if these drugs really work, don’t you think we’d be using them? Yeah.

Jane McLelland
I know. And where’s the evidence, of course, is, you know, and that’s, that is a problem is looking at the evidence. And there is epidemiological evidence for a lot of these drugs, certainly for metformin, for statins, for aspirin and a combination of those three.

Jane McLelland
There’s a Korean study that shows that survival is significantly longer. But you need you need to look at individual studies as well, but not just of the drug itself. Because if you look at studies of metformin on its own, it doesn’t work very well.

Jane McLelland
It really isn’t. And that’s the problem is that they will always throw up. Oh, well, look at this study that showed, and I didn’t, you know, I gave a talk not that long ago to a whole load of researchers and doctors, and that was absolutely the response that I got.

Jane McLelland
Well, this study showed that metformin didn’t work. You know, and you need to understand that if you’re looking at metformin in in vitro, then it’s not really going to have much of an effect. Actually, metformin affects the gut, and we know the microbiome is absolutely essential.

Jane McLelland
We need to get the right metabolites and the right bacteria in your gut to fight cancer. So that’s where, you know, a lot of it’s effect actually is on the gut itself. It reduces the amount of sugar generally in the whole body.

Jane McLelland
So it’s a sort of a reduction of that. It blocks something called gluconeogenesis, which is what the body does when it starts to become a bit low on glucose. The liver switches on these pathways to breakdown fat and sometimes protein as well to release energy and to change, change it into glucose.

Jane McLelland
So you can get, you know, get the energy and it actually damps that down, which is one of its big plus points for metformin is that’s what it does. But you don’t see that if you’re testing it in a, you know, in in vitro you don’t see that, right?

Robin Daly
So just to be clear for all this, in vitro means somewhere in the test tube in a lab and not in a real. Person.

Robin Daly
And yeah, it’s a very different terrain for something to be tested in. So the message we get from them is, you know, the drugs don’t work, which makes you into the lunatic fringe for saving your own life by the way you did.

Jane McLelland
Complete lunacy.

Robin Daly
And the effect of all this denials to perpetuate the myth of alternative crack medicine and kind of take the attention away from the most important question of what’s actually working. So, you know, in order for the mainstream to be right, people like you, Jane, I’m afraid you just got to be wrong.

Robin Daly
And this is where it’s kind of the foundation of the black and white, good, bad, proven unproven tabloid nonsense that’s enormously unhelpful for people who are trying to stay alive in the face of Camper.

Robin Daly
You know, everybody is pressured to line up dutifully behind one side or the other. So you’re either a sensible compliant person or you’re a conspiracy theorist. And so you’re going to entirely miss the benefits of being helped by either or both, which that now at least has got proper name integration.

Robin Daly
That’s what we like. And so, you know, just want to ask, you know, six years after the publication of your book in terms of a broader acceptance to your ideas, well, how’s the progress?

Jane McLelland
I think it’s amazing actually. I, I, I know I’ve had this massive effect on patients, which I love, but I’m now starting to creep more into the sort of the doctor realm and even the not just the integrative doctors who seem to be very aware of me now across the world, you know, and awful lot of people and this, you know, seen as Paul Marek read my book and he’s written a book called Cancer Care, which he thought that maybe my ideas weren’t specific enough for cancer.

Jane McLelland
I know it’s very annoying for people that I don’t put down particular protocols for different types of cancer. In my book. I give a general guideline for people to go and do their homework to research on their own.

Jane McLelland
And I think that’s really important for people and empowering for people to go out there and be forced to look at the research because they will realize I’m not talking nonsense at this point. And, you know, this is this is key, I think for for the patient and for an empowering point of view to actually get them in the driving seat to make them feel like they’re actually in control.

Jane McLelland
You know, research is the answer and education is the answer. So he wrote a book called Cancer Care and his book has been taken down in the UK on Amazon. And mine was briefly my both editions. I, I know that I have some opponents out there who were very traditional, conventional.

Jane McLelland
These these are not even oncologists, all right. These are people, they are self styled experts who think they know what they’re talking about, but they haven’t done the deep research. They really haven’t.

Jane McLelland
So unfortunately, you know, that’s that’s where I am at the moment, fighting people who haven’t understood how cancer develops. And you know, a particular, one of these opponents is bringing out a book in February, which I know is going to be trying to dispel the myths of cancer, etcetera.

Jane McLelland
But she’s she’s talking from last century, unfortunately.

Robin Daly
OK, we’ll see.

Jane McLelland
I’m looking forward to reading it and actually seeing what what she says.

Robin Daly
So look, repurposing of drugs is kind of the the headline if you like, but it’s the thing that a lot of people have heard of. But actually you were and you are intent actually not on the drugs, but on the metabolic pathways, on starving cancer as you so graphically described it in your book title.

Robin Daly
And if a drug happened to be the best way of doing that, you’re on to it. But that said, it’s important to say that it was the result that you’re after and the method was incidental to that. In fact, I think it’d be fair to say that you have a preference for using a natural product if you can achieve the same effect, Am I right?

Jane McLelland
Well, yes, absolutely. And, you know, I was really worried about taking the drugs when I had that option, but I couldn’t see natural alternatives that would be equivalent you so, and I think this is, is important for people to know that there’s still a huge amount of resistance to statins because it reduces your Coq 10 and, and other things.

Jane McLelland
And they think that cholesterol is important. Actually, cancer cells are different to any other cells. You know, they, they have their own metabolism. They create, they actually manufacture cholesterol inside the cell as part of energy storage.

Jane McLelland
And a lot of cells do that. In particular, cancer cells do that more than others. So we see that statins are particularly useful for certain cancers like ovarian and breast melanomas. They, they, they all respond very well to statins, but you kind of have to keep an open mind with cancer.

Jane McLelland
You can’t. And, and my, and I like to be fairly, I’d say I’m quite agnostic about what works and what doesn’t. As long as it works, try it, you know, and, and think about it. And that goes with traditional treatments, you know, the whole conventional side.

Jane McLelland
Don’t dismiss them and say, right, I’m just going to do natural. You need to look at it, but you actually need to look at the dose as well, because if you have more in your cocktail, you probably don’t need the same dose as somebody who’s just doing a one approach.

Jane McLelland
If you have more things, then you can dilute the other things down a little bit. So yeah, I did take quite a lot of stuff, which, you know, led to my nickname Maracas, because that’s making so many supplements.

Jane McLelland
But you know that that’s part of that’s part of how I got through I because I didn’t know what was actually going to work at the time when I was throwing everything at it.

Robin Daly
Absolutely reasonable the the result speaks for itself. So a very important term we used at the beginning of that which is open minded. And you know, I’ve, I’ve known over the 20 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve dealt with a lot of people I felt were not open minded enough.

Robin Daly
And that’s not just on one side or the other, it’s either side. Some people are not open minded enough about conventional medicine and some people are not open minded enough about the other options that could be mixed in and they’ve suffered as a result.

Robin Daly
I felt, I mean I’m not a doctor but this is just my opinion.

Jane McLelland
You’ve seen many people, I’m sure go down 1 route or another. And and that you have evangelists for a particular time. Yeah. Evangelist, yeah. So you have keto evangelists, you have, you know, cannabis evangelists, you have true also.

Jane McLelland
So you, you end up with this shouting noise from a particular part of the, the, you know, integrative movement. And you need to understand there are pros and cons with everything. Even with my stuff, there are pros and cons with it.

Jane McLelland
Some people can’t take some of the drugs. You know, your, if your liver’s a mess, then you have to be very careful. And if you have, if you’re already on blood thinners or whatever, you, you, you probably can’t take Diapredamol.

Jane McLelland
Or maybe you could swap the blood thinner you’re on for diapredamol. I do think there are, you know, potentially a lot of people would benefit from that, but you know that there are reasons why people get fixated and they go down this little narrow park.

Jane McLelland
And I think researchers are partly to blame because they go down this little route and they see that their particular Ave. of research is producing fantastic results and then they test it in the mouth so they can see fantastic results.

Jane McLelland
But it’s actually getting those results over into humans, which is always a tricky thing. And we do need to have trials and we do need to have we do human trials with a lot of the stuff. I would love my cocktail to be properly evaluated.

Jane McLelland
I mean, the, the, the care oncology did put together some tests which are in, in trials, which well, real world trials rather than randomised clinical trials because you can’t really do that in this situation. it’s very hard to do.

Robin Daly
Plenty of argument to say they’re superior anyway, yeah.

Jane McLelland
Yeah. So, but they did one on GBM and they looked at results of that over a few years and they found, you know that it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I I know people who have full remission of GBM from using cocktails of drugs so.

Robin Daly
Yeah, yeah, it’s great. Anyway, I think it’s an interesting two way synergy that happens there between the evangelists and the natural desires of patients as well. Because the whole thing about actually being, as you described, open minded all the time is everything’s always a bit unknown.

Robin Daly
You’ve actually got to go forward with everything being uncertain. And people crave for certainty. They crave for the simple answer that’s going to get them out of this mess. And when somebody comes along and says, Yep, I’ve got it here, it’s very appealing.

Jane McLelland
Very appealing and I never guarantee anything. What I would I do is I say, look, you’ve just got to carry on researching for yourself and that’s the best we can do. And I think it’s important for people to consult with doctors who are experienced in this area.

Jane McLelland
I’ve updated my list, by the way, on my website for the doctors in the UK. And I have, you know, I just think it’s important for people to talk to metabolic doctors who have worked in this field for a while because that they need to hear from the white coat, not just from people like me.

Robin Daly
Absolutely. It gives confidence yeah yeah, very good. Anyway, super important message for people with cancer who want to stay alive. Yeah, remain open minded. OK, so the last thing I want to talk about today is cancer theory.

Robin Daly
If someone listening’s been recently diagnosed, I think they would be forgiven for thinking surely I don’t need to learn about that stuff. I can leave it to the boffins. But actually it is a really important issue to understand because it provides the very foundation for the US and them wars in cancer in that the theory that’s being used by the oncologist.

Robin Daly
So they’ve been taught that underpins their approach to treatment is not the same one that drives your thinking, for example, and nor that for the a growing raft of integrated practitioners. So I wonder if you’d outline in the simplest terms and explain the difference between the theories and why people with cancer would do well to understand what theories behind any treatment they’re offered.

Jane McLelland
Well, there are multiple theories.

Robin Daly
It’s true, it’s true, but we’re going to talk about the two big ones here.

Jane McLelland
Conventional.

Robin Daly
And the leader?

Jane McLelland
On it, so these somatic theories, kind of the biggest theory that the conventional side will use to say that it is genetic. And the problem with that is that they think it’s a sort of a random switching on of the genes, but they don’t know why.

Jane McLelland
All right, so the P53 is kind of like the guardian of the genome. And if the P53 gets altered or mutated or, you know, any kind of dysfunction in that gene changes the metabolism of the cell. And there’s, there’s talk between mitochondria and the, the genome, you know, the, the nucleus in the cell.

Jane McLelland
This goes on all the time. It’s an interchange of information. But does that, you know, which comes first the chicken or the egg? Is it the mitochondria or is it the nucleus? Because the mitochondria actually has genetic material as well.

Robin Daly
Just to be clear there for this, is the mitochondria, is the energy production facility inside the cell? Yes. And is that from the nucleus we’re talking about?

Jane McLelland
Yeah. So mitochondria resemble bacteria because that’s what they were in ancient, ancient pre multicellular form. So there was a sort of an interplay between how the mitochondria produced energy and how the cell produced energy with, you know, and then they started the symbiotic process of working together.

Jane McLelland
And this process of switching from fermentation of fuels to using oxygen for fuel. This is like if you go for a run and you run out of oxygen, your cells, what your muscle cells will start producing lactic acid, right?

Jane McLelland
This is a normal process. And this doesn’t require genetic mutations. This is just a switch. It’s just a switch that goes on and off. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t involve a mutation at all. And the process of cancer involves a small of a switching on of these fermentation fuels.

Jane McLelland
Not only, I mean there are some cancers that actually are more driven by the normal Krebs cycle, which is producing energy, the ATP, which is your energy just by the process. It’s called OXFOS. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but OXFOS and glycolysis are like the two pathways are producing energy key pathways.

Jane McLelland
All right, So you get this into play if you and with cancer, if you block one, you’ll up regulate you’ll make the other one more active in order for the cell to create the energy to divide produce all the DNA for its progeny.

Jane McLelland
You know, so it’s constantly, constantly looking to divide needs energy for this. It’s constantly needing the food coming in from various sources. And this is switched on by lots of pathways first. Now cancer, in my view, starts in the cell membrane to start in the cell nucleus.

Jane McLelland
How does that happen? It has to get to the cell. Something has to trigger it to, to, to get the cell nucleus to, to switch these genetic pathways on. And you’ve got lots of things on the cell surface that send signals into the cell.

Jane McLelland
And the two key pathways for that are inflammatory pathways, which triggered by some cytokines. These are inflammatory pathways. So you get nuclear factor, Kappa beta and STAT 3. Now these the, the, the balance of these two will depend on your cancer actually producing more energy through Oxfus or producing more energy through glycolysis.

Jane McLelland
And this is kind of controlled by nuclear factor Kappa beta, which is a big pathway. But this is signaled from inflammatory cytokines on the surface of the cells. So there’s lots of stuff that goes on before you actually get down to, to what happens in, in the energy production.

Jane McLelland
And then the genetic mutations happen afterwards, right? It’s it’s downstream.

Robin Daly
A chicken and egg argument.

Jane McLelland
Yeah, but but downstream is the sort of genetics, but there’s epigenetics. This is the influence of the tumor microenvironment on the surface of the cell, which actually changes the messages that go in.

Jane McLelland
So, and that’s the, the important point is that you actually need to look at the tumor microenvironment. That’s the key. We know from research going way back to Mina Bissell, she’s done a fantastic YouTube on that and it’s well worth people looking her up and, and watching that.

Jane McLelland
Yes, yeah. And so I, I think it’s important to to, to look at all of these factors. And there are lots of things that can stimulate bad signalling on the surface of the cell, a lack of oxygen, pathogens there.

Jane McLelland
There are many things, you know, constant carcinogens or inflammation from trauma for over long periods. You know, lots of things actually ’cause this inflammation on the cell surface. And it’s often a combination of things.

Jane McLelland
One thing on its own is probably not going to do it. You need to have a combination of different things to actually change the epigenetics and actually change the way that the cell functions. And then it kind of gets into a vicious cycle of of doing the wrong thing.

Robin Daly
So yeah, just putting it in chicken and egg terms, which is quite nice and sort of simple in a way, is that one theory is telling you that the problem is that they the we’ve got this genetic problem, which is then creating all the things you’re talking about as being drivers, as saying they’re, they’re downstream.

Robin Daly
So they are the result of the problem in the nucleus and but the metabolic theory as we haven’t given its name yet, but that’s the the other theory.

Jane McLelland
Well, I I would say it’s actually more epigenetics and changing the material. I mean, cancer is a combination of epigenetics, metabolism and genetics. So, you know, you may be more susceptible to cancer if you’ve got a BRCA mutation that it doesn’t mean you’re going to get cancer If if you if you, if these other.

Robin Daly
They contribute to you.

Jane McLelland
Factor, yeah, but, you know, it’s the the emphasis is all on, you know, these genetic mutations. So when you look at a cancer cell and it has mutated, the reason it mutates is because it’s finding different pathways to resist whatever treatment you’re giving it.

Robin Daly
Right. Well, interesting with that is the chicken and egg thing about it though, is that something that you think of as a symptom? A conventional thinking is that that’s A cause and the the the pathways and the a behaviour that you’re you’re looking at is a symptom.

Robin Daly
So each side is looking at the opposite way. It’s like through the looking glass.

Jane McLelland
You know, there, there probably there probably are some cancers triggered directly by mutagens. So thyroid cancer, for example, you know, if you have radiotherapy or if you have some sort of high level of radioactive, so you have a lot of X-rays might trigger a problem in your thyroid Hiroshima, for example.

Jane McLelland
You know, so there are there are some things that are actually going to potentially trigger cancers directly, but that’s rare. You know, that’s, that’s the most. And if you look at the expanding number of people getting cancer today, we know it’s the tumor environment that is causing this increase.

Jane McLelland
And particularly in young people, you know, they’re really not aware of the importance of what they’re putting into their mouths. They think it’s just fuel, you know, calories, that’s all they need. But the quality of what you’re putting in your mouth is absolutely key.

Jane McLelland
And we have a lot of phytonutrients that are in plants that we should be having daily and and also micronutrients, magnesium, zinc, lots of things to boost the immune system and keep our metabolic processes happening normally.

Jane McLelland
We’re just not having and magnesium is found in in green vegetables. Are people having enough green vegetables? No.

Robin Daly
No, they’re not anymore.

Robin Daly
Right. Look, we’re just about out of time. That was that was really great. Thank you. Yeah. So it’s just interesting to see how your attention is all on these pathways and what’s happening in them. And have we lost control of what’s happening there?

Robin Daly
And can we regain control somehow? But your messages, you or you won’t do it with one thing. You’re going to have to do it with a lot of things. So. So don’t think it’s simple. It isn’t. So I hope that’s a good summary of Jane McClellan Party.

Robin Daly
All right, so we’re going to have to leave it there. I’d like to add my personal acknowledgement to all the accolades you’ve already had for taking a hugely important science and single handedly lifting it from total obscurity to a level where there’s there’s probably barely an integrated practitioner in the world who hasn’t at least heard of it or isn’t actually practicing it themselves.

Robin Daly
So from your point of view, this has been a very top level conversation today. I understand, as I know you’re always used to plumbing the depths and the detail of complex networks.

Robin Daly
But I do hope it’s been very helpful to people are just lifting the lid on the topic and wondering if repurposing could have some potential to help them. So thank you very much, Jane.

Jane McLelland
Pleasure. Always wonderful to speak to you, Robin.

Robin Daly
Thanks very much. Bye, bye. As I mentioned at the outset, James and Doctor Michael Castros presentations at Yes to Life Repurposing Revolution seminar are available on video from the Yes to Life shop.

Robin Daly
That’s Yes to life.shop.org. Also a thriving Facebook group which is called Jane McLelland Off Label Drugs for Cancer is where you can join almost 100,000 others to learn and share. And you can also check out Jane’s previous appearances on the Yes to Life show by going to the show page.

Robin Daly
That’s Yes to life.org.uk/radio shows, and search for Jane by name in the guest search box. I sincerely hope you found today’s interview helpful and interesting, and that you’ll make a point of joining me again next week for another Yes to Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.