"Cell" Excess fat helps cancer cells suppress immune cells and accelerate tumor growth

Obesity has become a global "epidemic" and one of the most important public health problems in the 21st century

It has been proven to be associated with increased disease risks of dozens of cancers (lung cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, etc.

Over the years, scientists have discovered obesity-related risk factors that may lead to tumor growth, such as metabolic changes and chronic inflammation

However, the mechanism of the interaction between obesity and cancer is not fully understood

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and their collaborators have revealed this answer for us in a new study: Obesity caused by a high-fat diet allows cancer cells to win the battle against the metabolic "fuel" of immune cells

Related papers were published in the scientific journal "Cell"

In this work, in order to reveal the effect of obesity on mice with different types of cancer (lung cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, melanoma, etc.

The results show that obesity induced by a high-fat diet can impair the function of CD8+ T cells (a cell that can kill cancer cells, virus-infected cells, and other damaged immune cells) in the tumor microenvironment of mice, and accelerate tumor growth

This is because cancer cells will redesign their metabolic mechanisms to adapt to the increasing fat, so as to better capture energy-rich fat molecules from T cells, and accelerate tumor growth while inhibiting T cell metabolism

Blocking this fat-related metabolism can significantly reduce the tumor volume of mice passively receiving a high-fat diet and improve anti-tumor immunity

At the same time, researchers found that increased expression of prolyl hydroxylase 3 (a protein that has been shown to inhibit excessive fat metabolism in normal cells) can largely reverse the negative effects of high-fat diet on tumor immune cell function.

In the future, it may become a therapeutic target for a variety of cancer diseases

Marcia Haigis, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of cell biology at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, said the results of this study indicate that treatments that are effective in one environment may no longer be effective in another

Considering the current obesity epidemic worldwide, and since CD8+ T cells are the "main weapon" of immunotherapy, they can activate the immune system to fight cancer

Therefore, this research discovery has very important theoretical value and proposes a new strategy to improve this immunotherapy

Obesity Shapes Metabolism in the Tumor Microenvironment to Suppress Anti-Tumor Immunity