Intravenous High-Dose Vitamin C in Cancer Therapy

National Cancer Institute

January 24, 2020, by Lewis Cantley and Jihye Yun

The discovery and isolation of vitamin C was one of the most important advances in improving human nutrition.

• The optimal dosage of vitamin C required to maximize its health benefits has been hotly debated ever since its discovery a century ago. Linus Pauling, a world-renowned chemist and two-time Nobel Prize Laureate, strongly advocated that megadose quantities of vitamin C (above 1 g intake per day) would prevent and treat many illnesses including the common cold and heart diseases. However, mainstream medicine has largely ignored or even ridiculed Pauling’s claim. This controversy is still very much alive today.

• Utilizing high doses of vitamin C as a cancer therapy is no exception to this controversy. Nearly 60 years ago Toronto physician William McCormick observed that cancer patients often presented with severely low levels of vitamin C in their blood and featured scurvy-like symptoms, leading him to postulate that vitamin C might protect against cancer by increasing collagen synthesis. In 1972, extending this theory, Ewan Cameron, a Scottish surgeon, hypothesized that ascorbate could suppress cancer development by inhibiting hyaluronidase, which otherwise weakens the extracellular matrix and enables cancer to metastasize. He began treating terminally ill cancer patients and published a case report of 50 patients in which some of the treated patients benefited from high dose vitamin C.

• Encouraged by the result, Cameron teamed up with Linus Pauling to conduct clinical trials involving terminal cancer patients. In 1976, they published a study of 100 patients with terminal cancer treated with ascorbate. Their disease progression and survival rates were compared to 1000 retrospective control patients who were matched with the vitamin C-treated patients regarding age, sex, type of cancer and clinical stage and who were treated by the same physicians in the same hospital, and in the same way except that they did not receive vitamin C. Although the study was not well designed by modern standards, mainly because they lacked the placebo-control group, the results demonstrated that patients treated with vitamin C had improved quality of life and a four-fold increase in their mean survival time.

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https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/ras/ras-central/blog/2020/yun-cantley-vitamin-c