Nature: Revealing the 'culprits' that contribute to the body's cancer as we age

September 4, 2020 // -- As the body converts food into energy, our bodies accumulate a lot of "junk" as we age, according to a recent study published in the international journal Nature, from the Weill Cornell School of Medicine, among others. Scientists at the agency have found that a particular metabolic path line may play a potentially lethal role in the development of cancer, which has increased scientists' understanding of how the aging process accelerates the mechanisms by which individuals develop deadly cancers, and provides new ideas for effectively blocking the occurrence of metastasis tumors.
Photo Source: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain In this study, researchers focused on cancer metastasis, the process by which cancer cells break away from the original tumor location and form new tumors at other points in the body; It appears to accumulate as the body ages; to analyze whether MMA plays a key role in cancer metastasis, researchers studied people 30 and younger and 60 years old and older to see how the behavior of lung cancer cells and breast cancer cells changed when exposed to the body's blood; and the results showed that cancer cells in 25 of the 30 blood samples from young subjects showed no change. But cancer cells in 25 of the 30 blood samples of older patients began to exhibit different traits, increased migration and invasiveness, and developed some tolerance for two drugs often used to treat cancer.
When these cancer cells were injected into mice, they produced metastases in the lungs of mice; The key, it seems, is a special reprogramming mechanism that turns on the expression of the SOX4 gene, which previous studies have shown promotes more aggressive and metastasis of cancer cells.
In an analysis of whether SOX4 actually alters the properties of cancer cells, the researchers blocked the expression of the gene and found that MMA could not have the same effect; and that blocking SOX4's function inhibited the ability of cancer cells to become resistant to both cancer therapies.
There are still a number of issues that researchers need to address, including why MMA accumulates as the body ages, and whether the mechanisms found in blood samples and mouse studies are the same in humans, and whether the blood samples used by the researchers are from men, and later researchers want to determine whether MMA accumulation can have the same effect in women's bodies;
Finally, the researchers say that the accumulation of MMA pre-exists with high-protein diets, so a low-protein diet may help cancer patients respond better to therapy; in theory, drugs that lower MMA levels may also play a role, potentially reducing the vicious spread of cancer in the body.
() Original source: Gomes, A.P., Ilter, D., Low, V. et al. Age-induced complex of methylmalonic acid promotes tumour progression. Nature (2020). doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2630-0.