Scientists have successfully turned breast cancer cells into ... fat

Researchers have said there is a way to make human breast cancer cells turn into fat cells based on a new study in mice.

To achieve this feat, the team exploited a strange path that cancer cells have metastasized. Their results are only the first step, but it's a really promising approach.

In fact, when you cut your fingers, or when your baby develops organs, epithelial cells begin to turn into a type of stem cell called a mesenchyme and then transform into any cell your body need.

This process is called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and is long known that cancer can use both this path and the opposite path called MET (transition from mesenchymal to epithelial). , to spread throughout the patient's body.

Cancer cells can turn into fat.

Recently, researchers have arrested mice with a form of human breast cancer and treated them with a diabetes medication called rosiglitazone and a cancer treatment called trametinib. .

Thanks to these drugs, when cancer cells use one of the aforementioned transition pathways, instead of spreading, they have changed from cancer to fat cells, a process called too fat production process.

"The models used in this study have allowed the assessment of cancer cell proliferation in an immediate tumor. The results indicate that in a combination therapy involving patients with rosiglitazone and trametinib specifically targets cancer cells with increased ductility and their fat cells , "the team said.

'Breast cancer cells undergoing EMT not only differentiate into fat cells, but also completely stop proliferating. So how to do this? Because a trametinib increases the conversion of cells such as cancer cells into stem cells and then increases the conversion of stem cells into fat cells. As far as we can tell from long-term culture experiments, cancer cells that turn into fat cells remain fat cells and do not return to breast cancer cells' , senior author Gerhard Christofori , Biochemist at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

More notably, these two drugs have been approved by the FDA, making it easier to put this type of treatment into clinical practice for the actual person.

The team is continuing to investigate whether this therapy is associated with chemotherapy and whether it applies to other types of cancer.

"In the future, this innovative treatment can be used in combination with conventional chemotherapy to prevent both primary tumor growth and the formation of deadly metastases , " Christofori explained.