Could HSP and Temodal Interact to Increase Life Expectancy?

Today is a sad day for the Brain Tumor Community. Another Brain Tumor warrior passed away (Mary Catherine Calisto). By total coincidence she also lived in Pittsburgh for a period of her life and battled a disease for many years while living an inspiring life. She lead the implementation of a new front in Brain Tumor Research, to which link I am posting here (http://www.braintumor.org/giving/mcc-sbi/). The research is focused on Systems Biology and is expected to yield new treatment paths to further extend life expectancy of brain tumor patients.

Every time something like this happens I get energized to further investigate the mechanisms of brain tumor and its treatment, I get upset when this disease takes great people away from us, so I am now studying the mechanisms of temozolamide, the chemo drug that all of us take while treating brain tumors. I came across the paper below that explains the mechanism of temozolamide on brain tumors.

http://www.rsc.org/images/TEMOZOLOMIDE_ChemistryWorldJul09_tcm18-155909.pdf

As I read the paper I came across the following conclusion: "although temozolomide was developed before the target-driven approach to drug design became fashionable, it does have a very distinct molecular target - the O6 oxygen atom of guanine residues within DNA, particularly those within poly-guanine sequences. It can therefore be expected to interact with proteins that repair damaged DNA".

As I shared in previous posts this is consistent with the role of heat shock proteins, which lead me to once again study the role of Hsp. Below is a good summary about it:

http://www.sdbonline.org/fly/genebrief/hsp70.htm

As I read my high school biology book (high school today is what would probably be considered PhD material when I went to College) I found that cancers and tumors are generally caused by gene deletions (DNA degeneration), which can happen for multiple reasons such as contamination, heat shock, radiation etc. Here is what I found on Hsps: "The Hsp's and their constitutively synthesized relatives (termed heat-shock cognates, or Hsc proteins) form a diverse group of protein chaperones that can disaggregate proteins from large aggregates or assemblies, prevent aggregation of denatured proteins, aid the renaturation or folding of proteins to reach their proper conformation, direct proteins to degradative pathways, and bind proteins to restrain their function, making them available for ligand binding or allowing them to translocate across membranes. Although some of the classes of Hsp's clearly have distinct activities, they also exhibit overlapping functions, and may share proteins that act as cofactors, known as cochaperones (Gong, 2006)."

I am sure that I am acting like a boy that just learned the basics of physics and is trying to teach an engineer how to build a bridge but as I witness the reduction in the size of my tumor I have developed the faith (at this stage it just cannot be considered science) that the combination of exercising and temozolamide has helped me.

To recap why I am such a believer in exercising I discovered that Hsp levels increase after strenuous exercising (measurable only after a half-marathon distance run). This could also simply be God's will to extend my life, but I am not sure why God would save me and not others, so I am trying to help by coming up with these crazy theories that might have already been extensively exhausted. Might humanity be able to save my life like it saves so many people today that might have died in the past from trivial to treat diseases today. I really believe that we are getting closer to the day that brain tumors will be seen as a trivial to treat condition and I hope that this "message in the bottle" is not needed to get us to a cure to brain tumor.

My crazy suggestion is to run a clinical trial on people treated with temozolamide that exercise for one hour or more at least twice a week and those that do not exercise at all. In my case exercising seems to be working but I am a relatively "young" patient. I have just interrupted my temozolamide treatment and will find out next week if I should continue it based on an MRI with spectroscopy and prefusion, fingers crossed! But if I need more temozolamide no big deal, I was lucky enough to have absolutely no side effect from it.

Mary Catherine Calisto, I have not met you but in a way I feel very close to you. Thanks for living such an honorable life and setting a great example, there is nothing more we can ask from anyome, you have a new fan, rest in peace.