Dr. Mark Levine is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and also worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital for a number of years. He is a physician-scientist and a senior investigator at NIH (National Institutes of Health). Information from his research on intravenous vitamin C as a cancer therapy is simplified and summarized in the following paragraphs.
Dr. Levine did basic research on the pharmacokinetics of oral vitamin C and IV vitamin C. He wanted to find out whether there was a difference taking vitamin C orally vs. intravenously, and also because there is conflicting information about the usefulness of vitamin C as a cancer therapy.
The first thing he did was to study healthy adults to see what would happen if progressively increasing doses of oral vitamin C were given, and the effect this would have on the plasma ascorbic acid concentration. What he found was from 30mg to 200mg, there was a very steep increase in plasma concentration of ascorbate. In going past 200mg this curve flattened out. In fact, going up to 2000mg orally didn't really increase the plasma concentration by much. It was his conclusion that taking 200mg of vitamin C a day orally was an optimal dose, and that past this dose a person was not affecting the plasma concentrations of the vitamin significantly.
He then gave IV vitamin C intravenously and what he found was that this acted totally differently. Tight control is bypassed until renal filtration restores plasma vitamin C concentrations to a steady-state. In fact, what he found was that the plasma concentrations of ascorbic acid may be 50 to 70 fold higher compared to maximal concentrations from oral administration. “Concentrations achieved only by intravenous administration kill cancer but not normal cells. It is likely the killing occurs because pharmacological extracellular ascorbate concentrations generate ascorbate radical selectively in the extracellular fluid, but not in blood. Ascorbate radical in the extracellular fluid may then generate hydrogen peroxide, followed by the formation of other reactive species.” In other words, IV vitamin C was acting like a drug rather than a vitamin.
Dr. Levine found not all cancer cells were responsive to IV Vitamin C, but the most sensitive ones were lymphoma, followed by breast and prostate cancers and bladder cancers. The hydrogen peroxide produced diffuses into cells where it blocks the ATP (energy production) in cancer cells, but not in normal cells for some reason. His studies were done using both animal and human cells in test tubes. Dr. Levine felt human clinical trials were overdue, especially since CAM physicians have been using intravenous vitamin C for years in thousands of patients with good results and with no ill effect if patients were properly screened for kidney disease and G6PD deficiency.
Several other physicians at the conference were involved with small clinical trials using high doses of IV vitamin C in cancer patients at their respective hospitals, and their observations were that IV Vitamin C was useful as a cancer therapy in some cancers.
I would also add that several years ago I was in a conference with Sir Arnold Takimoto, M.D.. This physician was the medical director of several cancer treatment centers on the West coast and it was his observation (as well as that of other physicians) that some vitamin C products did not work as well as others in their patients. He discovered that corn-derived vitamin C was not as effective as non corn-derived e.g. from beet root or cassava root source. His opinion was that this was due to genetic modification of much of the corn in this country. Most vitamin C is a by-product of the high fructose corn syrup industry. At the Center, we carry only non-corn derived vitamin C powder, liquid, and tablets, and use only non corn-derived vitamin C in our IV therapy.
