Fat fuels cancer’s spread in mice

Fat fuels cancer’s spread in mice
Dietary needs of these wandering cells could prove to be their Achilles heel.
Heidi Ledford
07 December 2016

The cells responsible for cancer’s spread — and for most deaths from cancer — may have a fatal weakness according to studies in mice: a reliance on certain fats to fuel their invasion.

It is a difficult and hazardous undertaking for a cancer cell to uproot itself, travel through the bloodstream and take hold in an entirely different part of the body. (Non-cancerous cells are often programmed to self-destruct if they leave the tissue they live in.) Researchers have long struggled to understand which cancer cells can manage the feat, and how they do so.

But a study published on 7 December in Nature1 has identified a population of oral tumour cells that are able to make the journey in mice, and has found that such cells may feast on fats to fuel the trip. Determining how certain cancer cells spread throughout the body — a process called metastasis — is a big step forward, says Xiang Zhang, a cancer researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who was not involved in the study. “Now people have a suspect they can follow.”

To find that suspect, Salvador Aznar Benitah of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology in Spain and his colleagues looked among oral-cancer cells for those that could seed tumours. Within that population of cells, the team found some that expressed high levels of a molecule called CD36, which helps cells to take up lipids from their environment.

Such lipids could serve as an energy source for wandering tumour cells, they reasoned. “Metastasis takes a lot of energy,” says Ernst Lengyel, a gynaecological oncologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in the project. “As a cell you must be able to adapt to changing environments, reprogram protein expression, establish a beachhead and start proliferating as soon as possible.”

Stopping the spread
Benitah and his team found that high CD36 expression was required for metastasis in mice. Antibodies that blocked CD36 — and eliminated its interaction with fatty acids — completely inhibited metastasis, although they did not affect the development of primary tumours.

The researchers also mined public databases and found that high expression of CD36 correlated with poor medical outcomes in bladder, lung, breast and other cancers in people.

Benitah’s team is now working to develop antibodies against CD36 that could be used in clinical trials, although he estimates it would take at least another four years to reach that milestone. Benitah notes that such a therapy may be effective even after cancer has started to spread: in mice, experimental antibodies eradicated metastatic tumours 15% of the time. The remaining metastatic tumours shrunk by at least 80%.

The team is also looking at the implications of another finding: feeding the mice a high-fat diet led to more and larger tumours in the lymph nodes and lungs — a sign of metastasis — compared with mice on normal diets. Benitah’s team is now carrying out a study that aims to enrol 1,000 people with cancer, profiling lipids in their blood to look for any links to the spread of cancer cells.

But at this stage, it is too early to tell people to avoid fatty foods, cautions Lengyel — especially people with cancer who may need a high-energy diet. “That’s a very dangerous message,” he says.

Click to expand...

WIN 52 said:

Yeah, you would need to know what type of fats the diet consisted of. That stood out for me when reading this study.

Click to expand...

Miguel Ángel said:

For me it will just be interesting to see if some MSM throws the baby out with the bathwater and starts to rant again: fats are evil!

Click to expand...

Marina9 said:

Miguel Ángel said:

For me it will just be interesting to see if some MSM throws the baby out with the bathwater and starts to rant again: fats are evil!

Click to expand...

I would pretty much imagine that's the case :( now that a lot of MSM are putting out information about good and healthy fats, maybe someone up there got mad about it...

Click to expand...

Formula g/kg:

Maltodextrin 160.0
Sucrose 90.0
Lard 310.0
Soybean Oil 30.0
Cellulose 65.5
Mineral Mix, AIN-93G-MX (94046) 48.0
Calcium Phosphate, dibasic 3.4
Vitamin Mix, AIN-93-VX (94047) 21.0
Choline Bitartrate 3.0 manufacturing date, and lot number
Blue Food Color 0.1

Click to expand...

Gawan said:

I think too that it is a bunk study.

Click to expand...

Gaby said:

Gawan said:

I think too that it is a bunk study.

Click to expand...

Pretty much like all the studies used to demonize fat. They use toxic vegetable oils such as soy bean oil, and then blame the lard. This is what Ancel Keys did back in the 50s.

These researchers are still in the dark ages when it comes to fat research. More info here.

Click to expand...

Yas said:

Humans' need of fat is very high, that's also why humans' milk is higher in fat than any other mammals milk (or at least that's what I remember reading).

Click to expand...

Out of all the types of milk sometimes consumed by people, reindeer milk has the most fat, with 22.5 percent fat. Philippines buffalo milk has 10.9 percent fat, yak milk can contain up to 9 percent fat, sheep milk has 5.3 percent fat, cow milk has between 4 and 5.5 percent fat, camel milk has 4.9 percent fat, goat milk has 3.5 percent fat and horse milk has 1.6 grams of fat.

Click to expand...

aimarok said:

Doesn't cancer cell metabolism purely rely on fermentation? How then fat per se can promote cancer cell growth?

Click to expand...

Keit said:

Yas said:

Humans' need of fat is very high, that's also why humans' milk is higher in fat than any other mammals milk (or at least that's what I remember reading).

Click to expand...

Maybe it was about something else? Because human milk has 3%--5% of fat, while other mammals have much higher percentages. For example:

Out of all the types of milk sometimes consumed by people, reindeer milk has the most fat, with 22.5 percent fat. Philippines buffalo milk has 10.9 percent fat, yak milk can contain up to 9 percent fat, sheep milk has 5.3 percent fat, cow milk has between 4 and 5.5 percent fat, camel milk has 4.9 percent fat, goat milk has 3.5 percent fat and horse milk has 1.6 grams of fat.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

And then there's human breast milk, which contains 54% of saturated fat. Because breast milk is the most perfect food available for developing babies, the presence of high amounts of saturated fat can not be easily seen as an "error."

Click to expand...

Gaby said:

Gawan said:

I think too that it is a bunk study.

Click to expand...

Pretty much like all the studies used to demonize fat. They use toxic vegetable oils such as soy bean oil, and then blame the lard. This is what Ancel Keys did back in the 50s.

These researchers are still in the dark ages when it comes to fat research. More info here.

Click to expand...