“We want to make cancer treatments more effective,” said Dr. Evan Lien, lead author of the study and a professor at VAI. “The best way to do that is to understand how cancer cells behave and find ways to disrupt their defenses. Our findings are an important step toward creating evidence-based diets that could enhance current treatments in the future.”
Cancer cells actively use lipids to grow, converting them into energy that helps them spread quickly. Scientists focused on the process of ferroptosis, a type of cell death that occurs when fat molecules inside cells are damaged. It turned out that depriving cancer cells of access to fat makes them vulnerable to it, which will help get rid of them faster.
In experiments using cell models, Dr. Lien’s team demonstrated that lipid restriction leads to increased sensitivity of cancer cells to drugs that induce ferroptosis. Lien notes that this discovery, although it requires further research, already offers hope for new approaches to cancer therapy.
“Diet is a relatively simple thing to control,” Lien said. The researchers are already working to determine whether diet can be used to manipulate the type and amount of fats to make ferroptosis-inducing drugs more effective. The study’s first author, Kelly Sokol, along with Lien and colleagues, are continuing to test the technique in other cancer models to confirm its general applicability.