Diabetes drug hope for cancer patients

They used a new method based on the food cancer cells eat to predict which patients have a poor prognosis. Excitingly, they suggest these patients could benefit from metformin, a cheap and safe diabetes drug which is showing great potential as a cancer treatment.

The findings come from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit at the University of Manchester and Thomas Jefferson University in the USA and are published today in the journal Cell Cycle.

Professor Michael Lisanti, from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit at the University of Manchester, said: “We’ve shown that the saying, ‘you are what you eat’ holds true for cancer. The food cancer cells consume is crucial to how well a patient does and what treatment they need.

“If cancer cells are consuming high-energy food, this makes a tumour more aggressive and harder to treat. However, patients could benefit from metformin, which cuts off this fuel supply. There is more work to do but this test could be an important new way of tailoring treatments to a patients needs, across a range of cancers.”

Professor Lisanti’s team first looked at cells in the laboratory and fed them high-energy foods, known as lactate and ketones. They found which genes were expressed based on this fuel supply, and developed a gene signature based on this.

They then looked at 219 breast cancer patients and studied which cancer cells fed on ketones and lactate. This food comes from healthy cells nearby. They found those patients with cancer cells which consumed high levels of ketones and lactate were more likely to have their disease return, for it to spread to other organs and to die.  The test combines the gene signature with the ketone and lactate food supply. This could show which patients are likely to have a poor prognosis – with those same patients potentially benefiting from metformin.

Professor Anthony Howell, Director of the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit in Manchester, said: “We have discovered important new insights into how cancers feed themselves. It is a step towards having each patient get the right treatment for them – what we call personalised medicine. We are looking at a new way to separate patients based on who should respond well to the treatments we have, and who might need something different.

“It is particularly encouraging that some of those treatments might already be in the doctor’s drug cabinet, and cheap to prescribe. We have some way to go but we hope that drugs like metformin will be saving lives of breast cancer patients over the next few years.”

At the Manchester Research unit we are bringing together world-class scientists to find new treatments which will help women live longer. To help us continue this work, please