Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that high doses of vitamin C can significantly slow the proliferation of cancer cells, while having minimal impact on healthy ones. The results of their study were published in the scientific journal Cancers.
Traditional methods for assessing cell viability, such as MTT/MTS assays, rely on a special dye changing color when a cell is active. However, vitamin C itself reacts with these dyes, which can lead to false-positive results, overestimating cell survival rates. To avoid such inaccuracies, the research team employed an alternative method, PI/Triton X-100, which uses propidium iodide – a dye that binds to DNA only in dead cells.
Thanks to this approach, it was conclusively demonstrated that cancer cells, especially those whose survival depends on hormone receptors, indeed undergo cell death under the influence of vitamin C. Notably, healthy cells exhibited high resistance even to elevated concentrations of the vitamin.
The scientists emphasize that these results have so far been obtained under laboratory conditions (in vitro). In the future, vitamin C could potentially serve as an adjunct to existing standard treatment protocols, but this would require careful determination of optimal dosages and the development of reliable control mechanisms.
Earlier research has also shown that vitamin C can thicken the epidermis by stimulating skin cell division through epigenetic pathways.
