File photo: The Stephenson Cancer Center building in Oklahoma City, photographed in 2010. Photo: Nightryder84 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and fitted. Adapted image: CC BY-SA 3.0.
A University of Oklahoma researcher has received a five-year, $2.6 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to study how dietary fat may change the way pancreatic tumors grow and weaken the immune system's response to cancer.
Kamiya Mehla, an associate professor of oncology science and a research member of OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center, will lead the project, the university said in its Nov. 12 announcement.
Her team is investigating two connected questions: whether excess fat changes how pancreatic cancer cells use energy, and whether it makes immune cells less able to attack the disease.
The project builds on preliminary experiments in mice. Animals with pancreatic cancer that ate a lard-based, high-fat diet developed more aggressive tumors than animals that ate the same number of calories with much less fat, according to the university.
That comparison is important to the research because the diets differed in fat content rather than simply in the amount of food energy the animals received. The team will now combine further mouse experiments with analysis of human pancreatic cancer tissue to look for related changes in how cells process fat.
Studying the tumor and the immune response
The researchers found more immune cells called granulocytes in the mice fed the high-fat diet. These cells can interfere with the body's ability to fight cancer. Reducing their activity in experiments improved the ability of other immune cells to attack pancreatic cancer cells, OU said.
Mehla's team wants to understand how tumor cells may push immune cells to take in more fat, reducing their ability to fight the disease.
The work could also help researchers understand a difficult nutritional problem in pancreatic cancer care. Many patients develop cachexia, a condition involving severe muscle and weight loss that can make treatment harder to tolerate.
Co-investigator Leah Hoffman Anderson, a nutritional sciences professor and registered dietitian, said dietitians have often encouraged those patients to eat high-calorie foods to help maintain their weight. The research aims to better understand how to support patients' nutritional needs while studying fat's possible effects on tumors.
The findings described so far come from mice, and the new study is intended to build evidence rather than establish a diet for patients.
Source: University of Oklahoma
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