April 29, 2024

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Excess fat helps cancer cells “suppress” immune cells and accelerate tumor growth

Excess fat helps cancer cells “suppress” immune cells and accelerate tumor growth



 

Cell: excess fat helps cancer cells “suppress” immune cells and accelerate tumor growth.

Obesity has become an “epidemic” worldwide and is one of the most important public health problems in the 21st century.

It has been proven to be related to dozens of cancers (lung cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer). And colorectal cancer, etc.).

Increased risk of disease, and worse prognosis is related to survival.

 

Over the years, scientists have discovered obesity-related risk factors that can lead to tumor growth, such as metabolic changes and chronic inflammation.

However, the mechanism of the interaction between obesity and cancer is not yet fully understood.

 

Excess fat helps cancer cells "suppress" immune cells and accelerate tumor growth

 

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and their collaborators have revealed this answer for us in a new study: Obesity caused by a high-fat diet allows cancer cells to win the battle with immune cells for metabolic “fuel”.

Related papers entitled “Obesity Shapes Metabolism in the Tumor Microenvironment to Suppress Anti-Tumor Immunity” were published online in the scientific journal Cell.

 

In this work, in order to reveal the effect of obesity on mice with different types of cancer (lung cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma, etc.), the researchers provided different groups of mice with a high-fat diet. -fat diet (HFD) and control diet (control diet, CD), in which high-fat diet can cause obesity symptoms and other obesity-related changes in mice, and observe the tumor microenvironment (including the tumor internal and surrounding environment) Of different cell types and molecules.

The results show that obesity induced by a high-fat diet can impair the function of CD8+ T cells (a type that can kill cancer cells, virus-infected cells, and other damaged immune cells) in the tumor microenvironment of mice, and accelerate tumor growth .

 

This is because cancer cells will re-design their metabolic mechanisms to adapt to the increasing fat, so as to better snatch energy-rich fat molecules from T cells, and accelerate tumor growth while inhibiting T cell metabolism. 

Blocking this fat-related metabolism redesign can significantly reduce the tumor volume in mice passively receiving a high-fat diet and improve anti-tumor immunity.

 

At the same time, the researchers found that the increased expression of prolyl hydroxylase 3 (a protein that has been shown to inhibit excessive fat metabolism in normal cells) can largely reverse the negative effects of high-fat diet on tumor immune cell function.

It may have the potential to become a therapeutic target for a variety of cancer diseases in the future.

 

Marcia Haigis, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of cell biology at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, said that the results of this study indicate that a therapy that may be effective in one environment may no longer be effective in another environment.

Taking into account the current prevalence of obesity worldwide, and since CD8+ T cells are the “main weapon” in immunotherapy, they can activate the immune system to fight cancer.

Therefore, this research discovery has very important theoretical value and proposes new strategies for improving this type of immunotherapy.

 

 

Reference:

Obesity Shapes Metabolism in the Tumor Microenvironment to Suppress Anti-Tumor Immunity

Excess fat helps cancer cells “suppress” immune cells and accelerate tumor growth

(source:internet, reference only)


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