Berberine - Starving Cancer of Glucose, Glutamine & Fatty Acids... PLUS suppression of Cancer Stem Cells!

It's time to wake up to the use of berberine in the fight against cancer!

Berberine is actually a compound called an alkaloid and is found in many plants including European barberry, goldenseal, goldthread, Oregon grape, phellodendron, and tree turmeric (1). One reader recently asked how to extract the berberine from the barberry that was growing in his garden. I am not an herbalist so here is some research which describes how eutectic solvents (environmentally friendly solvents) and lactic acid tinctures yield the best results. (2). (Professional Herbalist Referral)

The popularity of berberine is largely thanks to the incredible work of Jane McLelland and her paradigm changing book ‘How to Starve Cancer’. (If you want to take Jane’s online course to learn about off-label drugs then use the following affiliate link for 10% off) or type KING10 at checkout. Happy Learning!!

https://how-to-starve-cancer.teachable.com/?affcode=748639_whpppbyc

Berberine has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for decades. It is a yellow coloured compound (also a photosensitizer) which has anti viral, anti bacterial, anti inflammatory and anti fungal properties.

In this article I share research papers for the use of Berberine in each kind of cancer. Information about each of the pathways that Berberine works on in cancer and research to show how Berberine makes chemotherapy and radiation work better, demonstrating how it even helps medical treatment to attack cancer stem cells. Something Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy don’t do on their own!

Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

Dr Paul Marik (of IMA, formerly the FLCCC Alliance) reports in his book, ‘Repurposed Drugs for Cancer’ that Berberine exhibits the following properties:

Berberine Induces:

• Apoptosis

• Autophagy

• The Immune System

Berberine Inhibits

• Cell proliferation

• Tumour Microenvironment

• Cancer Stem Cells (see the end of this article for more on this)

• Glucose

• Glutamine

• Angiogenesis

mTOR/AMPK

Berberine blocks mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) which is a GROWTH or anabolic pathway. It also upregulates (speeds up) the AMPK (catabolic) pathway, inducing apoptosis.

This means that cancer cells die at the end of their normal cell cycle, which all cells should.

Berberine conversely also stops cancer cells from reaping the spoils of chemotherapy and radiation. These medical treatments wreck the tissues in our body, leaving fragments of DNA and other small molecules laying around which in a normal state of autophagy (self eating) we would clear up. Cancer cells hijack this clean up pathway, reap these spoils and use the fragments to grow tumours. (Acknowledgement to Jane McLelland for this idea).

Berberine stops this scavenging action from happening.

Read on to learn which cancers Berberine has shown to be effective for and how it blocks glucose, protein AND fatty acid pathways, effectively depriving cancer of the fuels it needs to grow.

You can see in the following diagram that PI3K (a kinase) is blocked by berberine. If you want to know more about kinases then read this little play, which demonstrates how kinases do ‘phosphorylation’ and make inflammation happen.

PI3K along with other kinases can be triggers for MMP9s - Matrix Metalloproteinases which are kind of like pac men, chomping their way through tissues around tumour and creating a path for breakaway cancer cells to metastasise.

The diagram calls this, inhibition of invasion which is essentially where Berberine blocks the metastatic potential of cancer.