Molecular Medicine Israel

Fat Tissue Can Help Cancer Cells Proliferate, Metastasize

Researchers disentangle how adipocytes communicate with prostate tumors in mice.

EDITOR’S CHOICE IN DISEASE & MEDICINE
The paper

J. Huang et al., “Adipocyte p62/SQSTM1 suppresses tumorigenesis through opposite regulations of metabolism in adipose tissue and tumor,” Cancer Cell, 33:770–84, 2018.

Obesity is second only to smoking as the biggest preventable cause of cancer in the US. It’s linked not only to cancer incidence, but also to disease progression and outcome. So understanding how fat tissue communicates with tumor cells in vivo has long been a goal for cancer researchers.

To do that, most groups “give mice a high-fat diet and see how the tumor grows,” says Jorge Moscat, who studies cancer metabolism at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California. But this diet triggers multiple, confounding effects on mouse metabolism, he adds. He and his colleagues decided to try another approach: selectively knocking out the gene for an autophagy-promoting protein in the adipocytes of a transgenic mouse model of prostate cancer. Moscat and his team knew from previous studies that noncancerous mice whose fat cells lacked this protein, called p62, were obese and insulin resistant, even when they ate normal diets. The researchers wanted to see what effect, if any, the alteration would have on cancer cells….

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