Merlin L. Marquard

Molecular biotechnologist helping cancer patients with outliving cancer.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

1. Marusyk A, Polyak K. Tumor heterogeneity: Causes and consequences. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Reviews on Cancer 2010;1805:105–17. doi:10.1016/j.bbcan.2009.11.002
2. Min H-Y, Lee H-Y. Molecular targeted therapy for anticancer treatment. Exp Mol Med 2022;54:1670–94. doi:10.1038/s12276-022-00864-3
3. Wang X, Zhao S, Xin Q, et al. Recent progress of CDK4/6 inhibitors’ current practice in breast cancer. Cancer Gene Ther 2024;31:1283–91. doi:10.1038/s41417-024-00747-x
4. Wang C, Wang J, Qi Y. Adjuvant treatment with Cordyceps sinensis for lung cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 2024;327:118044. doi:10.1016/j.jep.2024.118044
5. Zhang L, Xie J, Gan R, et al. Synergistic inhibition of lung cancer cells by EGCG and NF-κB inhibitor BAY11-7082. Journal of Cancer 2019;10:6543–56. doi:10.7150/jca.34285
6. Bennett LL. Synergistic Effect of Resveratrol and Paclitaxel in the Treatment of Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma. OBM Genetics 2024;8:1–18. doi:10.21926/obm.genet.2404268
7. Thongpon P, Intuyod K, Chomwong S, et al. Curcumin synergistically enhances the efficacy of gemcitabine against gemcitabine-resistant cholangiocarcinoma via the targeting LAT2/glutamine pathway. Scientific Reports 2024;14:16059. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-66945-7

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Can chemotherapy ever be selective enough to only attack cancer cells, but not healthy ones?

Yes, theoretically this is perfectly possible.

In its simplest form such a selective chemotherapeutic would need to be specifically targeted at a particular patient’s specific cancer, as there is incredible variation in cancer cells, both within the same patient and between patients.[1]

This is of course not much of interest to large pharmaceutical companies, who thrive on the provision of standardised therapeutics to large populations, as a specifically targeted chemotherapy would necessarily involve close patient contact with the manufacturer, which would in turn necessitate a kind of ‘decentralisation’ of care.

Now, there already exist imperfect versions of such targeted chemotherapeutics, which use general cancer cell tendencies, instead of patient specifics, to target cancer cells more strongly than healthy cells.[2] These therapeutics still do affect healthy cells, but to a lesser extent than non-targeted ones.

A approach, which I’d expect to bear fruit much sooner, is the approach of using adjuvant therapies, which do one or all of the following: sensitising cancer cells to treatment or diminishing treatment side effects.

Such approaches already exist and some are even in practice in various places on earth, but are sadly ignored by or unknown to most doctors I know or have seen.[3–7]

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

1. Perelmuter VM, Tashireva LA, Savelieva OE, et al. Mechanisms behind prometastatic changes induced by neoadjuvant chemotherapy in the breast cancer microenvironment. BCTT 2019;11:209–19. doi:10.2147/BCTT.S175161

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

How can neoadjuvant chemotherapy make cancer cells more aggressive?

There’s work on neoadjuvant chemotherapy published back in 2019.[1]

Neoadjuvant – in fact, probably all – chemotherapy can promote various aspects of tumour biology, which themselves lead to more aggressive more metastatic cancer cells.

Some examples include:
- the remodelling of the tumour microenvironment,
- the generation of treatment-resistant cells,
- the promotion of metastasis by induction of cellular stress and the generation of new blood vessels,
- maintenance of chronic inflammation,
- negative change of the immune responses in the tumour microenvironment,
- promotion of cancer stemness,
- and enchanced invasiveness and metastatic colonisation.

As far as I understand, it’s not entirely clear, whether this results in a net-loss for the patient.

Don’t hesitate to ask a follow-up question!

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

1. Hosseini SM, Salari N, Darvishi N, et al. Prevalence of severe malnutrition in cancer patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Health Popul Nutr 2025;44:252. doi:10.1186/s41043-025-01006-x
2. EL-Najjar SE, Naser IA, AL-Wahidi KM, et al. Assessment of nutritional status of patients receiving chemotherapy: sample from European Gaza hospital. BMC Cancer2025;25:1224. doi:10.1186/s12885-025-14571-5
3. Bansal N, Alharbi A, Shah M, et al. Impact of Malnutrition on the Outcomes in Patients Admitted with Heart Failure. Journal of Clinical Medicine 2024;13. doi:10.3390/jcm13144215

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Is there a way for cancer patients to manage long-term health issues, like heart failure caused by chemotherapy?

In my experience the best way to curtail the long-term health issues caused by chemotherapy is to improve general health and correct the nutritional deficiencies left in the wake of chemotherapy.

It’s been established, that cancer patients become depleted of essential nutrients (various vitamins and minerals), when undergoing chemotherapy.[1–2]

Furthermore, for the specific concern of heart failure, malnourishment is associated with longer hospitalisation and worse outcomes in patients suffering from heart failure.[3]

Thus, correcting chemotherapeutic-derived malnourishment (or rather any and all malnourishment) would be expected to improve long-term health issues arising from chemotherapy and other common cancer treatments.

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

1. Chang JC. Cancer stem cells: Role in tumor growth, recurrence, metastasis, and treatment resistance. Medicine2016;95:S20. doi:10.1097/MD.0000000000004766
2. Nwokolo GC, Ganesan TS, Pors K, et al. Cancer stem cells in focus: Deciphering the dynamic functional landscape of stemness in cancer. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Reviews on Cancer 2025;1880:189440. doi:10.1016/j.bbcan.2025.189440

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Is it necessary to destroy cancer stem cells to stop cancer?

Short answer: no.

Long answer:

Let’s define some terms. Cancer stem cells are cancer cells, which exhibit high ‘stemness’. This means that they grow slowly, if at all, are biologically immortal, and aren’t much affected by treatments, which affect growing cells (such as most common treatments like chemo- and radiotherapy).[1] The characteristic of slow to no growth is called quiescence.

Furthermore, ‘stopping’ cancer would seem to mean the aim of the patient not dying of the disease. To achieve this it is sufficient to eliminate all growth of cancerous tumours, not their presence, for whether they’re present or not, if they’re not growing, they can’t kill a patient yet alive.

This means, that whilst they can persist through treatment challenges, they aren’t – if they remain as such quiescent cells – much dangerous to the patient. Problems arise, when they exit quiescence and generate a population of proliferating cells, thus giving rise to a new growing tumour after treatment conclusion.

What’s interesting is, that cancer stem cells don’t seem to be as much a cell type of cancer as a behaviour of some cancer cells in response to external stimuli. This means, that cancer cells can move in and out of behaving like stem cells in processes termed dedifferentiation and redifferentiation, respectively.[2]

As this process seems to occur in response to external stimuli, you don’t really need to destroy cancer stem cells to stop cancer. You simply need to keep them from reentering a proliferative state, where they form a new tumour, that grows to kill the patient. It’s entirely sufficient to simply keep these cancer stem cells quiescent. Granted, doing this is more easily said than done.

Nonetheless, you don’t need to destroy cancer stem cells to stop cancer (per the definition given above for ‘stop cancer’). You simply need to stop cancer, meaning its growth and thus ability to threaten the life of the patient.

Don’t hesitate to ask a follow-up.

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Can cancer currently be cured?

Theoretically, that is a possibility, though the problem with cancer is, that cancer can be present yet undetectable by our current methods. This means, that you can be declared to have ‘no evidence of disease’ and yet have cancer cells or tiny tumours somewhere in your body, which could reengage, given the right context or trigger.

So, yes, you can be cured, but we can’t actually measure, whether you have been cured, which makes it pragmatically not a thing to have cancer cured.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

References:
1. Egashira R, Matsunaga M, Miyake A, et al. Long-Term Effects of a Ketogenic Diet for Cancer. Nutrients 2023;15. doi:10.3390/nu15102334
2. Hamaguchi R, Isowa M, Narui R, et al. Clinical review of alkalization therapy in cancer treatment. Frontiers in Oncology 2022;Volume 12-2022. doi:10.3389/fonc.2022.1003588
3. Cook KM, Shen H, McKelvey KJ, et al. Targeting Glucose Metabolism of Cancer Cells with Dichloroacetate to Radiosensitize High-Grade Gliomas. International Journal of Molecular Sciences 2021;22. doi:10.3390/ijms22147265
4. Cotino-Nájera S, Herrera LA, Domínguez-Gómez G, et al. Molecular mechanisms of resveratrol as chemo and radiosensitizer in cancer. Front Pharmacol 2023;14. doi:10.3389/fphar.2023.1287505
5. Heider CG, Itenberg SA, Rao J, et al. Mechanisms of Cannabidiol (CBD) in Cancer Treatment: A Review. Biology2022;11. doi:10.3390/biology11060817
6. Karumuru V, Dhasmana A, Mamidi N, et al. Unveiling the potential of Urolithin A in Cancer Therapy: Mechanistic Insights to Future Perspectives of Nanomedicine. Nanotheranostics 2025;9:121–43. doi:10.7150/ntno.110966
7. Mehta HJ, Patel V, Sadikot RT. Curcumin and lung cancer—a review. Targ Oncol 2014;9:295–310. doi:10.1007/s11523-014-0321-1

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Do certain single chemotherapeutics show promise in overcoming cancer treatment resistance?

As far as I know and could find, the answer to that is no.

There are however promising results using combinations of chemotherapeutics with adjuvant drugs or other interventions, which target the mechanisms by which cancer cells become treatment resistant.

The use of ketogenic diet has for example been found to improve lifespan and probability of full remission in human patients.[1] Alkalisation therapy has been found to have a similar effect.[2] Dichloroacetate has been found to be sensitising tumours to radiotherapy.[3]

More prospectively – meaning in cell lines or animal models –, resveratrol has been found to sensitise cancer cells to radio- and chemotherapy.[4] Similar results have been found for cannabidiol, urolithin A, curcumin, and many more.[5–7]

Keep in mind with the latter paragraph, that these are preliminary results, not yet systematically investigated in human patients (as far as I know or could find).

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

1. Arnal A, Ujvari B, Crespi B, et al. Evolutionary perspective of cancer: myth, metaphors, and reality. Evolutionary Applications 2015;8:541–4. doi:10.1111/eva.12265
2. Höckel M, Behn U. The Order of Cancer: A Theory of Malignant Progression by Inverse Morphogenesis. Front Oncol2019;9. doi:10.3389/fonc.2019.00416
3. Hanahan D, Weinberg RA. The Hallmarks of Cancer. Cell 2000;100:57–70. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81683-9
4. Hanahan D, Weinberg RA. Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation. Cell 2011;144:646–74. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2011.02.013
5. Hanahan D. Hallmarks of Cancer: New Dimensions. Cancer Discov 2022;12:31–46. doi:10.1158/2159-8290.CD-21-1059

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Why does early cancer detection matter?

The development of cancerous tumours inside a patient can principally be conceived as an evolutionary adaptive process (i.e. the cell in question diverges genetically from the patient and thus technically becomes its own colony organism separate from the patient), an inverted morphogenetic process (i.e. the cell in question diverges behaviourally from other cells of the patient and thus becomes an aberrant member of the host organism), or various mixtures of the two processes.[1–2]

Not matter how exactly the process looks, the cells in question mature over time; they don’t suddenly turn from healthy cells into cancer cells. During this maturation cancer cells obtain the so-termed hallmarks of cancer, which are precisely what make cancerous tumours so dangerous and deadly to patients.[3–5]

As this process takes time, and as this process makes maturing cancer cells more dangerous over time, the earlier you can detect a developing cancer the less dangerous to the patient and the more treatable it will be (tendentially).

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

How important are regular screenings in catching cancer recurrence or treatment resistance?

Well, without regular check-ups and monitoring, it’s practically impossible to detect cancer recurrence or treatment escape. Patients should normally be monitored during and after treatment, both when the treatment effectuated disease regression into undetectability and when treatment only led to partial or no regression.

A failure to do so unnecessarily exposes the patient to not being able to adapt their treatment regimen to changing requirements or new data or worse still to lose the patient to an undetected recurrent tumour.

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

What are the odds of curing all cancers?

If current trajectories of ever-improving understanding of the disease (or diseases, depending on your conceptualisation of what defines cancer) continue, aren’t significantly disturbed by current geopolitical instability, and civilisation as we know it will continue to exist for the coming millennia, then the odds that cancer will be cured are practically 100%.

The great difficulty, however, is in pin-pointing exactly when such cures will be found to completion. Sadly, current dogmatic denial of scientific progress in the medico-political sphere should be expected to make such a finding of final cures quite the drawn out process.

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

1. Efferth T, Oesch F. Anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activities of frankincense: Targets, treatments and toxicities. Seminars in Cancer Biology 2022;80:39–57. doi:10.1016/j.semcancer.2020.01.015
2. Valente IVB, Garcia D, Abbott A, et al. The anti-proliferative effects of a frankincense extract in a window of opportunity phase ia clinical trial for patients with breast cancer. Breast Cancer Res Treat 2024;204:521–30. doi:10.1007/s10549-023-07215-4

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

How much is known about the use of Frankincense against human cancers?

Frankincense has shown clear promise for the treatment of cancer in pre-clinical models.[1] Pre-clinical means, that these models used mice or cell cultures to try to predict the effect frankincense would have on cancer cells in a human patient. They show us promising drugs, but are in no way failsafe.

That being said, frankincense has also lowered cancer cell proliferation in a study of human breast cancer patients.[2] When used in safe dosages it may very well be supportive of cancer patient survival, but more data is needed to say this definitively.

God bless.

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

In Defence of Classical Care and Classically Trained Physicians and Nurses
https://t.co/T969GI19QQ

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Anecdotal Success in Using a Soft Pharmaceutical Regimen to Lower the IL-6 Status in a Patient with Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma
https://t.co/zBdFQNZZLy

[Merlin L. Marquard @MerlinLMarquard]

Correction to incomplete data in 4 prior articles.

https://t.co/0H0t8Oy7cx