Cutting off cancer cells’ access to fat may help a specific type of cancer treatment work more effectively, reports a study by scientists at the Van Andel Institute.
The findings, published in Cell Chemical BiologyThey lay the foundation for developing personalized dietary strategies to help anticancer drugs better eliminate malignant cells.
“We want to make cancer treatment more effective,” said Evan Lien, Ph.D., assistant professor at VAI and corresponding author of the study. “The best way to do this is to understand how cancer cells behave and identify ways to breach their defenses. Our findings are an important step toward evidence-based diets that could one day augment existing therapies.”
Fats are critical nutrients necessary for healthy functioning. Cancer cells hijack normal cellular processes and steal resources such as fats, which then act as fuel for diseased cells to grow and spread.
The study focused on ferroptosis, a type of cell death that occurs when fat molecules in cancer cells are damaged. In recent years, targeting ferroptosis has emerged as an increasingly promising avenue for developing new anticancer strategies.
Many of the mechanisms that allow cancer cells to grow uncontrolled also allow them to avoid cellular quality control processes that normally kill and eliminate diseased cells. Ferroptosis may be an exception, making it a potentially powerful tool to leverage in cancer treatment.
Using cell models, Lien and his team showed that eliminating cancer cells’ access to fats makes them highly sensitive to ferroptosis and, by extension, drugs that induce ferroptosis.
The findings are promising, Lien says, but much more work is needed to replicate the discovery in other cancer models. He and his team are also investigating whether the type and amount of fat can be manipulated through diet to make ferroptosis inducers work more effectively.
“Diet is a relatively easy thing to modify,” Lien said. “We’re not there yet, but what we’re most excited about is how we could use what we learn to one day design diets tailored to different types of treatment. That could be transformative.”
Authors include Kelly H. Sokol, Cameron J. Lee, Thomas J. Rogers, Ph.D., Althea Waldhart, Abigail E. Ellis, Samuel R. Daniels, Rae J. House, Ph.D., Xinyu Ye, Mary Olsenavich, Amy Johnson, Benjamin R. Furness, and Ryan D. Sheldon, Ph.D. from VAI; and Sahithi Madireddy of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.