Tests on mice show that pancreatic cancer is “starved” by keto diet and new drug

Only about 5 percent of those affected survive a decade after diagnosis.

However, Pancreatic Cancer UK urged patients not to make radical changes to their diet as the trial is still in its early stages and the drug has not yet been tested on people with pancreatic cancer.

Researchers wanted to investigate how the body manages to supply itself with fat while fasting.

The team from the University of California, San Francisco in the USA discovered that a new cancer drug called eFT508, which is currently in clinical trials, blocks this protein and thus prevents the body from burning fat.

In studies on mice, researchers found that when cancer therapy blocks fat metabolism, which is the tumor's only source of energy, cancer growth appears to stop as long as the mice follow the ketogenic diet.

“Certain cancers, such as pancreatic tumors, may use ketone bodies as an alternative energy source to maintain their health,” researchers write in the journal Nature.

Professor Davide Ruggero, lead author of the study, said: “Our findings led us directly to the biology of one of the deadliest cancers, pancreatic cancer.”

Since the scientists knew that pancreatic cancer thrives on fat and that the protein eIF4E is more active in burning fat, they first put the animals on a ketogenic diet, which forced the tumors to consume only fats, and then administered the cancer drug.

This means, according to the researchers, that the drug cuts off the cancer cells' only source of nutrition – and the cancer appears to shrink.

Ruggero said: “Our results open up a vulnerability that we can treat with a clinical inhibitor that we already know is safe in humans.

“We now have clear evidence that diet could be used in addition to existing cancer therapies to specifically eliminate cancer.”

He said it is believed that most cancers have different vulnerabilities and that this is the basis for a new type of cancer treatment using nutrition and personalized therapies.

“More than half of those diagnosed die within three months… To improve survival rates, we urgently need new methods to diagnose and treat this devastating disease.”

“Understanding how cancer cells can grow and spread so quickly and what promotes this is a key area of ​​research that could lead to new and more effective treatments.”

Macdonald stressed that this new study is an early-stage investigation of a drug that has not previously been used in pancreatic cancer in humans – it was conducted in mice – “so we need to treat these results with caution.”

“People with pancreatic cancer suffer significantly from malnutrition and digestive disorders as a result of their cancer,” he says.

“Based on current evidence, we strongly advise people with pancreatic cancer not to radically change their diet unless a doctor advises them to do so.”