Cell: anti cancer with fat cells? Gu Zhen's team develops a new anti-cancer strategy for adipocytes

October 13, 2019 / bioun / -- researchers from Jonsson comprehensive cancer center at UCLA have found a new drug delivery pathway that may help prevent tumor growth and cancer recurrence in mice In preclinical studies, the team found that they could redesign fat cells, which provide fatty acid energy to promote tumor growth and metastasis, to reverse their malignant role in tumor development and deliver anticancer drugs directly to the tumor microenvironment Source: many solid tumor patients are treated with surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy or immunotherapy In the past decade, there has been great progress in treatment technology, but cancer usually relapses after treatment and becomes more serious In order to prevent cancer recurrence, drugs need to be delivered directly to the lesion Because fat cells are widely distributed in human body and can be easily separated and purified, the research team led by Gu Zhen of UCLA believes that fat cells can be used as an efficient drug delivery system However, tumor cells can trigger fat cells to release fatty acids to support tumor growth To solve this problem, researchers added anti-cancer drugs to fat cells to make them work like Trojans after entering tumor areas The team tested the new drug delivery system by using UCLA engineered fat cells to carry adiponectin, a chemotherapy drug commonly used to treat cancer, and found that the drug could be successfully loaded into lipid droplets made up of anti-cancer fatty acids in fat cells By connecting liposoluble lipid molecules with adriamycin, the toxicity of drugs to adipocytes can be reduced and the drug carrying capacity of adipocytes can be enhanced Once these adipocytes are injected into the residual tumor tissue of the tumor site or operation site, the encapsulated adriamycin and fatty acids are gradually released to the tumor cells through lipid metabolism, thus inhibiting the growth and recurrence of the tumor In tumor cells, the lipid linked to doxorubicin can be effectively lysed, indicating the killing effect of doxorubicin By combining fat cells with therapeutic capsules, the team demonstrated that the lipid metabolism pathway can be used for tumor specific drug delivery and drug development This study also shows that tumor supporting cells in tumor tissue can be used as Trojan horse for tumor treatment This method can be used not only in the delivery of tumor drugs, but also in other lipid metabolism related diseases Reference materials: Zhen Gu et al Adipocytes as anticoncer drug delivery depot Matter November 62019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mat.2019.08.007