As children we were always encouraged to eat our fruits and vegetables, owing to the numerous benefits ascribed to produce. While some of these benefits might simply be the result of eating fewer donuts, numerous compounds in fruits and vegetables have been identified that may improve health in a variety of ways including protection against diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. One such useful product is obtained from Soy plants.

Soy foods have already been associated with helping to prevent cancer, but new research from Wayne State University suggests that soy isoflavones can also aid in the treatment of cancer.

Radiation therapy is often utilized for solid tumors. Despite its usefulness in localized cancers, radiation therapy success is limited by reoccurrence of tumors and continued cancer progression. Nontoxic dietary agents may provide a way to increase the effectiveness of radiation therapy.

While clinical studies support the non-toxicity of soy isoflavones, these compounds alone do not appear to effectively treat cancer. However, soy isoflavones could act as a complimentary treatment to current radiation therapy.

Radiation works by damaging the DNA of cancer cells. This damage results in apoptosis of the cell or initiation of DNA repair. Cells that move into DNA repair may become resistant to radiation therapy; thus increasing the apoptosis of cancer cells in response to radiation increases the effectiveness of radiation therapy. Isoflavones increase apoptosis in cancer cells and inhibit DNA repair molecules. These properties make radiation more beneficial because they push cancer cells towards cell death rather than repair.

While radiation therapy has been useful in cancer treatment, limitations such as its inability to distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous cells still persists. In many ways this has made radiation therapy extremely toxic – in some ways as toxic as the disease itself, if not more so. This makes the development of radiation strategies that specifically target cancerous cells or protect normal cells highly desirable. New therapeutic strategies like limited range radiation therapy appear promising for bone cancer.

Other approaches to improving radiation therapy may not require reinventing the wheel; rather these types of approaches focus on complimentary treatments to improve the efficacy of radiation to cancer cells. Particularly, soy isoflavones appear promising in increasing the cancer-killing properties of radiation, while also protecting normal cells.

In cancer cells, specific signaling pathways are activated, resulting in tumor growth, invasion and metastasis. These pathways are not activated in normal cells unless cellular stress occurs. Because the activation of these pathways occurs differentially between cancer and normal cells, treatments that act upon these pathways may be able to specifically target cancer cells and leave normal cells intact. Radiation and soy isoflavones act on these signaling pathways, which could mean that they might be able to work in an additive manner. Because many of the signaling pathways that isoflavones target in increasing cell death are not active in normal cells, this may make the radiation therapy more targeted for cancerous cells.