New Curestarter-funded research has revealed how eating a diet very high in fat could make it easier for cancer cells to spread to other parts of the body. Intriguingly, special molecules which help our blood to clot also seem to play a central role in this mechanism. These findings will help us to understand how diet can interact with other factors to influence how cancer spreads, and lead to new ways to treat and manage the disease.
We hope that this research can be used to improve therapeutic responses against metastasis and help identify new risk factors to reduce its lethality. Your support is truly making a difference in the fight against cancer.
Many cancers can spread to other parts of the body, in a process called metastasis. But for a cancer cell to spread, it needs help.
First, the cell must break away from the original tumour and travel through our blood or lymphatic system. Then it must find shelter in a distant organ, in an area with the right conditions and enough food for it to settle and grow. This area is called a ‘pre-metastatic niche’.
Researchers have long known of links between high-fat diets, obesity and an increased risk for some cancers to spread. But we don’t yet know exactly how these factors might interact, to drive cancer spread.
There is a suspicion that a high-fat diet might make it easier for cancer cells to travel, and encourage formation of pre-metastatic niches.
This is exactly what Dr Héctor Peinado and his team at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have been investigating.
What have the researchers discovered?
The team investigated how triple-negative breast cancer spreads to the lungs in mice. These mice had obesity, and were fed a diet where over half of their calories was provided by fat.
The mice had important molecular changes in their lungs that seemed to promote cancer spread. These changes helped to prime pre-metastatic niches, making them ready to accept cancer cells.
The team also noticed that cancer cells seemed to activate a particular type of cell in the blood called a ‘platelet’.
Platelets are actually small fragments of cells. They usually help our blood to clot. However, they can also clump to cancer cells, perhaps helping to protect them (see image of platelets surrounding breast cancer tumour cells).
Importantly, switching mice back onto a normal diet, or decreasing the number of platelets helped to reduce cancer spread in the lungs of mice in this study. Together, these findings suggest that feeding mice a high-fat diet might trigger certain mechanisms that make it easier for breast cancer cells to spread, and settle in the lungs.
And when the team analysed blood samples from patients with triple-negative breast cancer during this study, they also found tantalising hints that increased blood clotting in some patients could be linked to a higher risk of cancer coming back.
But intriguingly, while there was a clear link between a high fat diet and cancer spread, the researchers were unable to confirm a specific link with having obesity in this study.
The study was small, and larger studies are needed. But the results show the complex connections between diet, changes to our blood cells, and cancer spread in humans.
What does this breakthrough mean for patients?
This study sheds important light on how diet and cancer can interact. If these findings are confirmed in human patients, it gives us vital new information that could lead to new ways for us to manage cancer. Perhaps we could potentially use diet modifications or anti-platelet drugs alongside other therapies, as a way of helping to manage the overall risk of cancer spread for some people.
But we need a lot more research before we can say this for sure. Future research should hopefully help to fully reveal these connections, and find out exactly how to translate this work into new therapies, and new ways to stop cancer spreading.
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