The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet designed to shift the body’s metabolism from burning glucose to burning fat.
A ketogenic diet (consisting of high-fat, low-carb foods) may improve treatment outcomes for people with pancreatic cancer, according to a study in mice. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered a way to eliminate pancreatic cancer in mice by putting them on a high-fat diet and administering an anti-cancer therapy.
How might the ketogenic diet affect pancreatic cancer?
The cancer therapy blocks fat metabolism, which is the cancer’s only fuel source while mice are on the ketogenic diet, and tumors stop growing, they said in the paper published in the journal Nature. The team first discovered how a protein known as eukaryotic translation initiation factor (eIF4E) changes the body’s metabolism to shift to fat consumption during fasting. The same switch also occurs, thanks to eIF4E, when an animal is on a ketogenic diet.
They found that a new cancer drug called eFT508, currently in clinical trials, blocks eIF4E and the ketogenic pathway, preventing the body from metabolizing fat. When the scientists combined the drug with a ketogenic diet in an animal model of pancreatic cancer, the cancer cells starved to death. The findings “open up a point of vulnerability that we can target with a clinical inhibitor that we already know is safe in humans,” said Davide Ruggero, a professor at UCSF.
In the study, the scientists first treated pancreatic cancer with an anti-cancer drug called eFT508 that disables eIF4E, with the intention of blocking tumor growth. However, thanks to other energy sources like glucose and carbohydrates, the pancreatic tumors continued to grow. But when they were put on a ketogenic diet, forcing them to consume only fat. By adding the drugs, the cancer cells’ only sustenance was cut off and the tumors shrank.
Ruggero said there is “strong evidence” that diet, along with cancer therapies, can help “precisely eliminate cancer” and may pave the way for personalized treatment.
(Inputs: IANS)
