"We're striving to make cancer treatment more effective," noted Dr. Evan Lien, lead author of the study and a professor at VAI. "The best way to achieve this is by understanding how cancer cells behave and finding 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 utilize lipids to fuel their growth, converting them into energy, which facilitates their rapid proliferation. Scientists focused on the process of ferroptosis—a type of cell death that occurs when fat molecules inside cells are damaged. It turns out that depriving cancer cells of access to fat makes them vulnerable to ferroptosis, which could help eliminate them more quickly.
Dr. Lien's team, using cell models, demonstrated in experiments 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 the development of new approaches to cancer therapy.
"Diet is a relatively simple thing to control," Lien explained. Scientists are already working to determine whether diet can be used to regulate 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, is continuing to test the method in other cancer models to confirm its general applicability.
