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US researchers study link between sugar, insulin and cancer

DCUK NewsBot

DCUK NewsBot

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The work of a team of researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York state, has highlighted important links between glucose, insulin and many forms of cancer. The team is led by Dr Lewis Cantley, an eminent cancer researcher whose ground-breaking work in this field began in the 1980's, with his discovery of an enzyme known as phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K). In the years since, PI3K has been implicated in as many as 80% of cancers and is called a 'master switch' by many scientists. PI3K bridges the gap between insulin release in the body and cell glucose uptake, growth and survival. Under normal conditions, this is not an issue and is part of normal growth. But, in the context of cancer, this process gets kicked into overdrive, allowing sugar-addicted cancer cells to take up more glucose, and so survive and grow more effectively. There is a known link between high insulin levels, type 2 diabetes and cancer. While drugs have been developed to inhibit this pathway, such as the FDA-approved leukaemia and lymphoma drug (idelalisib), these have not been as successful in practice as originally hoped. It was found that the drug actually caused a compensatory increase in insulin levels, which kept tumours growing. Dr Cantley and his team have since successfully used PI3K inhibitors alongside a ketogenic diet, which is known to lower insulin levels, to shrink tumours in mice. In their paper, published in the journal Nature, they concluded that "this insulin feedback can be prevented using dietary or pharmaceutical approaches". The team are now raising funds to translate this work into humans, with the hope that the ketogenic diet will allow the PI3K inhibitors to successfully shrink tumours in people as well. This work could add to the growing body of evidence showing that carbohydrate restriction through a ketogenic diet may have positive implications for cancer treatment and prognosis.

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If you read the paper carefully then you will see that the head line is a bit misleading.

Cancer is simply a cell that has become immortal and so will do what it needs to in order to grow and survive, which means producing substances that will cause blood vessels to grow into them, bit like how wound healing works and so the same with it other mechanisms as described in the paper. In fact some cancers produce some very complex substances to survive.

So they experimented with reducing the amounts of sugar that a patient was consuming during their cancer treatment and found that the growth of the cancer could be reduced or even stop progression.

But I am not sure which type of cancer the paper was studying, from the looks of it, it could be the more solid based ones and not the blood born ones.

From what I understand to the paper it is in early trials at the moment.

And before you ask I used to work in Paediatric Cancer Research in the very early 80's and it has been a long time since I worked in that field.
 
Knikki said:
If you read the paper carefully then you will see that the head line is a bit misleading.

Cancer is simply a cell that has become immortal and so will do what it needs to in order to grow and survive, which means producing substances that will cause blood vessels to grow into them, bit like how wound healing works and so the same with it other mechanisms as described in the paper. In fact some cancers produce some very complex substances to survive.

So they experimented with reducing the amounts of sugar that a patient was consuming during their cancer treatment and found that the growth of the cancer could be reduced or even stop progression.

But I am not sure which type of cancer the paper was studying, from the looks of it, it could be the more solid based ones and not the blood born ones.

From what I understand to the paper it is in early trials at the moment.

And before you ask I used to work in Paediatric Cancer Research in the very early 80's and it has been a long time since I worked in that field.
Click to expand...

I think that is why the boffins often say some cancers rather than saying cancer. I seem to remember watching a video that relates to this subject citing research in Germany centering on cancer patients using a ketogenic diet as an adjunct to pharmaceutical treatment but I have no up to date information on how that research is progressing or even if it is still ongoing.
 
@Guzzler To be fair the boffins probably did say some cancers but that does not make as good a head line so the journo who wrote it probably "enhanced" the head line ;)
 
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