Pancreatic cancer affects approximately 500,000 people worldwide each year. Despite being the 14th most common cancer by incidence, it is now the most common cancer in the world. seventh leading cause of death related to cancer. Its survival rate is only 10% after five years and, because of this, scientists do not stop studying treatments or aids that serve in some way to stop this evil.
Now, a group of workers at the University of California, San Francisco, have found an effective method against pancreatic cancer, and it is nothing more and nothing less than one of the most popular diets in recent years: the keto diet.
The ketogenic or keto diet is characterized by being a high-fat diet (over 50% of total energy expenditure), with moderate protein and low in carbohydrates (some authors indicate below 10%), thus inducing a state of ketosis in our body. In this state, ketosis, the body seeks to obtain energy from fatinstead of using glucose for this purpose. It had already been shown with breast cancer that by depriving malignant cells of glucose (their main source of energy), they become vulnerable to chemotherapy, radiotherapy or other therapeutic options.
Cancer cells were starving
Now, the American scientists have put laboratory mice on this high-fat diet, always accompanied by therapy, to test its efficacy against other types of cancer. “Our findings led us directly to the biology of one of the deadliest cancers, pancreatic cancer,” explains Davide Ruggero, PhD, Goldberg-Benioff Professor and American Cancer Society Research Professor in the Departments of Urology and Cellular Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF and senior author of the paper.
Ruggero’s team has discovered for the first time how a protein, eIF4E, is able to modify the body’s metabolism so that during fasting it consumes as much fat as possible. Through the tests they carried out, they realised that exactly the same thing happens when the animal follows a ketogenic diet. In addition, they observed that a new anti-cancer drug called eFT508currently in clinical trials, blocks eIF4E and the ketogenic pathwaypreventing the body from metabolizing fat. When scientists combined the drug with a ketogenic diet in an animal model of pancreatic cancer, Cancer cells were starving because they were unable to find a source of energy.
“Our findings open up a point of vulnerability that we can target with a clinical inhibitor that we already know is safe in humans,” says Ruggero. “We now have strong evidence for a way in which diet could be used alongside pre-existing cancer therapies to precisely eliminate a cancer.” Their research was published Wednesday in Nature.
Diet before treatment
Before finding the key—the keto diet—scientists first treated pancreatic cancer with eFT508 alone. However, they observed that rather than shrinking pancreatic tumors, they continued to grow, because they were sustained by glucose or carbohydrates. Knowing that pancreatic cancer can proliferate with fat and that eIF4E is more active during fat burning, scientists first put the animals on a ketogenic diet, forcing the tumors to consume only fat, and then subjected them to the drug, which is capable of blocking eIF4E. In this context, eFT508 was able to suppress the only sustenance of cancer cellsand the tumors reduced in size.
Ruggero and colleagues developed eFT508 in the 2010s, and it showed promising results in clinical trials. But now, more than ten years later, they have found a much more effective way of using it.
Genetic changes during fasting
There are several studies that show that the body changes when fasting is practiced. Humans, for example, can survive several days without food, because the body begins to look for other sources of energy, such as the fat it has already stored, to survive. But it has also been shown that the benefits go beyond weight loss.
“Fasting has been part of various cultural and religious practices for centuries and has often been thought to promote health,” said Dr. Haojun Yang, a postdoctoral researcher in Ruggero’s lab and first author on the paper, who says their finding “that fasting reshapes gene expression offers another biological explanation for these benefits.”
