Strategies to mimic fasting during chemotherapy enhance anticancer T cell activity in mice
Source: Medical Xpress
Fasting is known to increase positive outcomes during cancer treatment, and now two independent studies in mice show that fasting, either through diet or drugs, during chemotherapy helps increase the presence of cancer-killing T cells. The research teams show that rodents that received caloric restriction mimetics alone or chemotherapy combined with a fasting-mimicking diet had smaller tumor masses over time than those that received only chemotherapy. Both studies appear July 11 in Cancer Cell.
While the two papers demonstrate strategies to exploit the weakness of tumor cells to caloric restriction and enhance immune-mediated cancer cell death, further study will be needed to find out whether mimicking fasting can improve outcomes for all kinds of cancer treatments (especially emerging immunotherapies) as well as whether these results can be replicated in humans. For now, the research provides proof of concept for two potentially safe approaches to enhance chemotherapy.
Valter Longo, Stefano Di Biase, and Changhan Lee of the University of Southern California led the effort to use a fasting-mimicking diet to confer the benefits of starvation without the negative side effects. Mice with breast or skin cancers were given a low sugar, low protein, high fat, low calorie diet and were observed for 6 weeks while receiving doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, or no chemotherapeutic drugs. All of the mice receiving the diet-drug combination saw their tumors shrink to half the volume of the tumors in mice that received chemotherapy alone.
"Our main finding is that the T cells are essential for the toxicity of the fasting plus chemotherapy to cancer cells," says Longo, a gerontologist and cell biologist also of the University of Southern California Longevity Institute and FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology in Italy. "The biggest factor exposing cancer cells to the T cells is the effect on the enzyme heme oxygenase-1, which is normally at high levels in cancer cells. Fasting reduces oxygenase levels and gives rise to a number of changes that included the increase of tumor-killing cytotoxic T cells."
Read more: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-07-strategies-mimic-fasting-chemotherapy-anticancer.html
The full text article is being made available free of charge. Link to the original research released today:
http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(16)30221-5
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