[AlaskaAngel]

I'm no researcher. But in trying to understand what the reasons are for the interest in and ongoing research about the use of metformin for cancer patients, what interested me about it in particular was the understanding that chemo is not effective against stem cells, whereas metformin in some way on at least some stem cells, IS effective.

In other words, blasting endless cancer cells with chemo is very appealing as a way of "throwing the book at it" and it gets rid of maybe an awful lot of them, but not the stem cells, that then continue to create havoc.

Dr. Michael Lisanti was working on that at Jefferson, and later moved to Manchester, but it was articles about his work that got me interested. There were some legal battles about the rights to intellectual property by research institutions, and I'm not sure where all that ended up, but it is his work about it that is intriguing in regard to cancer being a metabolic disease. I just hope that with all the huff about intellectual property, the baby isn't getting thrown out with the bathwater!

A.A.