AI, Oncology Research and Therapy: Could Brain Science Fight Cancer?

There is a new paper in Nature Reviews Cancer, Why do patients with cancer die?, where the authors, reviewed “the proximal causes of mortality in patients with cancer and discuss current knowledge about the interconnections between mechanisms that contribute to mortality, before finally proposing new and improved avenues for data collection, research and the development of treatment strategies that may improve quality of life for patients.”

In an expounded feature on The Transmitter, Making cancer nervous, there were several striking quotes that include, “Nerve cells in the brain and throughout the body can turbocharge tumor growth — a finding that not only expands conventional ideas about the nervous system but points to novel therapeutic targets for a range of malignancies. Tumors are more electrically active than normal tissues. Most of the evidence, and really the center of the field, is around the idea that neurons and nerves — via a variety of mechanisms that researchers are still teasing apart — seem to regulate almost everything about cancer, from tumor initiation in many cases to tumor growth, tumor invasion and metastasis, probably resistance to therapy, and evolution of the disease. He decided to look into perineural invasion, or the tendency for cancer cells to cluster around local nerve fibers. He also knew that tumors that exhibit perineural invasion tend to be more deadly. The cancer cells use the nerves as highways to exit a primary tumor site and metastasize.”

The connection of neurons to cancers provides a key angle to accelerate new efforts in oncology research. Neurons are the primary functional cells in the brain. They are also present elsewhere — the spinal cord — in the central nervous system and across the body — in the peripheral nervous system.

There are two distinct features of neurons, where efforts could center to fight cancers — their electrical and chemical signals. There is no function that neurons operate that does not involve both signals. Memory, emotions, feelings, modulation of internal senses and everything associated with these functions, like pain, hurt, cravings, intelligence, creativity, regulation and others, are all mechanized by signals. There are influences on these signals from genes, glia, microglia, hormones, synaptic growth, blood vessels and so forth, but the signals are directly involved in functions and must be affected, for those influences to take hold.

What does this mean, with respect to how they organize information? Why is smell different from sound? Why is a sweet taste different from a salty one? How are the limits and extents of bodily functions determined? How does the self or subjectivity come by, with its spread across functions? How is emotion different from attention?

It is postulated that the human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals of nerve cells, with their interactions and features, in sets [available in clusters of neurons, across the central and peripheral nervous system].

Simply, the human mind is the signals, wherever they are, with their interactions and features, in sets. This makes everything else, including cells, the body, and signals the mind, differentiating the mind from the body.

The interactions are proposed to be how they structure functions, and the features are grades for how the functions work. Features include attention, awareness, or less than attention, self or subjectivity and intent or free will.

Conceptually, chemical signals, in sets, provide rations that constitute the configuration for information. The ways the rations are provided also qualify or grade those functions. Specificity of functions is determined by configurations [or formation] of rations of chemical signals. Electrical signals relay summaries of what chemical signals structure.

The Transmitter stated that “the rising awareness that the nervous system guides the development of organs and tissues throughout the body, and the understanding that tumors are not just undifferentiated lumps of cells, but neo-organs in their own right.”

So if tumors are guided and regulated like normal organs and tissues, how can the information organized for them be disrupted, both around the tumor microenvironment and from the brain?

In brain science, there are already several ways to access electrical and chemical signals. Psychoactive drugs do, neural probes do as well. Using a conceptual model of the human mind, how can they be targeted against growing?

It is already established that electrical impulses leap from node to node — going very fast — in myelinated axons, in what is called saltatory conduction. It is postulated that in a set of signals, they split, with some going ahead of others, to interact with chemical impulses like before, where if the initial input matches, the incoming one does nothing and goes the same way and if it does not match, the incoming one goes in the right direction explaining what is referred to as predictive coding, processing and prediction error. It is possible that there are no returns for those associated with tumors, providing an option to target.

There is a condition called phantom limb, where an individual who has had a limb amputated, appears to perceive pain, or other sensations, in the lost limb. Conceptually, this can be explained as not just the function — pain, but with features that qualify it like attention, principal spot, and distribution. This demonstrates that, aside from signals around the tumor, those in the brain can also be targeted. In doing so, it could be against attention or some other feature.

In summary, another serious direction to fight cancers is to explore the information organization of electrical and chemical signals, conceptually. There is also the possibility to use several non-invasive targets as well, for them — while administering other therapies — with fewer risks to normal signals.

For example, when an individual is seriously fatigued, where it seems there is no strength in the body or limbs, how are distributions between the sets of signals in the brain held back from those in the PNS, against the normality of those functions?

How is it possible to model this, and others, with AI, for therapy against cancers?

How can the information organization of sets of signals be useful to prevent primary and metastatic brain tumors, especially for the emergence of lumps of malignant cells?

Exploring how electrical and chemical signals of neurons, in sets, interact and their features, conceptually, across the CNS and PNS may hold an additional option against cancers.

According to data from the National Cancer Institute, “In 2024, an estimated 2,001,140 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 611,720 people will die from the disease. As of January 2022, there were an estimated 18.1 million cancer survivors in the United States. The number of cancer survivors is projected to increase to 22.5 million by 2032. By 2040, the number of new cancer cases (worldwide) per year is expected to rise to 29.9 million and the number of cancer-related deaths to 15.3 million (worldwide).”