The amount of fat we eat has a direct link to a cancer’s ability to spread around the body, according to scientists in Spain.
The growth of cancerous tumors at secondary sites in the body is called metastasis and is the main cause of cancer related deaths.
The researchers say a protein called CD36 absorbs fat from the cell membrane and is the agent that determines whether a cancer metastasizes or not.
“When one looks at a tumor and you see millions of different types of cells and, although there are many works published on metastasis, it was not still too clear which are the cells within those many millions that will eventually have this striking capacity to get out of the tumor and colonize distinct organs,” said team leader Doctor Salvador Aznar Benitah at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine at Barcelona.
The study, published recently in the journal Nature, also showed inhibiting CD36 in mice inoculated with the tumor cells completely eliminated their ability to metastasize.
“What happens if we block this CD36 and that’s what where we saw that for many tumors their ability to initiate metastasis was completely wiped out, not a lot but, I mean really completely, and then also if the metastasis have already formed and you inhibit the CD36 this metastasis dramatically shrinks, it becomes more smaller and a significant percentage actually it disappeared,” Aznar said.
The study is now shifting to testing with patients.
“We are taking a group of patients with oral cancer and we are testing in some of them what happens if you feed them with a diet of very low levels of palmitic acid versus another equally big group of patients that will be fed with a controlled diet not with a high content of fat but a standard amount of fat and then we will have to compare,” Aznar said.
The group is working with the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council Technology to co-develop a new antibody-based therapeutics against CD36 which, if successful, will mean a patient friendly product could be available within the next 5 years.
The research was welcomed as significant by Director of the Warwick Cancer Research Centre, Professor Lawrence S. Young
“The data on anti-CD36 neutralizing antibodies blocking tumor spread is very compelling as is the correlation of CD36 with poor prognosis in various human cancers. There has been much speculation about the role of dietary fat on cancer development and spread, and a growing literature on the role of tumor-associated adipocytes (fat cells) in various tumors including breast and ovarian cancer. This paper highlights a novel mechanism which may drive cancer spread and is amenable to therapeutic intervention,” Young told Reuters in a statement.
Cancer kills millions of people each year, and scientists are trying to discover what is behind the cells and what causes the disease.
While Dr Aznar thinks his study is just one more step toward the understanding of how cancer works, he feels it is a very important step.
“We now know much better, I think, what we need to do because the cells are telling us ‘this is what distinguishes me from the rest,'” he said. (Reuters)
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