High-fat diets increase risk of metastasis in cancer patients, but future treatment could mean 90% survive
Monday, December 12, 2016 @ 9:44 PM
SCIENTISTS in Barcelona have discovered cancerous tumours need fat, or lipids, to metastasise and that by isolating the fat-receptor protein in malignant cells, the risk of the disease spreading can be reduced.
Salvador Aznar Benitah, heading up the investigation team – photographed left with the main author of the resulting paper, Gloria Pascual – says experiments on rats with cancer have shown that a high-fat diet can accelerate metastasis by up to 15%.
The aim of the experiments which Aznar Benitah's team at Barcelona's Biomedical Research Institute (IRB) was to try to find the cells which cause metastasis and examine their properties.
Through this, they discovered the protein CD36 – a fatty-acid receptor which is present in very high quantities in malignant cells.
The report, published in the science magazine Nature, says the team tested a form of therapy on rats – although it has not yet gone through to the clinical trials on humans stage – which involved applying antibodies to the CD36 protein to block its reception of fatty acids.
They found that by doing this, in 10% to 15% of cases, the metastasis stopped altogether and, in those cases where it did not disappear, it reduced by nearly 90%.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com