2023-11-22 18:01:18
In medicine it happens that, sometimes, the bad guys are not so bad and the good guys are not so good. It often depends on the quantity, timing, or even the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus, for example, one of the most effective drugs against cancer, chemotherapy, emerged from a biological weapon like mustard gas; Vitamin A, on the other hand, is an essential substance for the formation and maintenance of soft tissues and bones and has antioxidant functions, but an excess of this nutrient can, however, cause skin problems, bone weakness and pain in the joints. joints. Nuances always matter. And this is demonstrated again by research published today in the journal Nature, which gives, precisely, another twist in the field of nutrition and concludes that there is a nutrient present in red meat – a food that nutrition experts recommend limiting a lot in a healthy diet – that improves the immune response against cancer . After conducting studies in the laboratory with animal models and human cells, scientists conclude that transvaccenic acid, a trans fatty acid found in beef, milk or butter, has potential as a dietary supplement to optimize the impact of immunotherapy in oncology. Experts recommend, in any case, caution when interpreting the results.
A group of researchers from the University of Chicago focused on the nutrients circulating in the blood, some 700 substances, such as organic metabolites, lipids or proteins, among others, that could play a role in health and disease. “There are still many things we don’t know; For example, a comprehensive understanding of the various physiological and pathological functions of each nutrient in different foods is not yet available. “Our study attempted to address this dilemma,” explains the study author, Jing Chenprofessor in the Department of Medicine and Director of the Cancer Metabolomics Research Center at the University of Chicago.
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The scientists reviewed a kind of library with more than 200 nutrients from the diet that circulate in the blood and studied which ones could have a function or influence anti-tumor immunity. Their research revealed that a particular trans fat, transvaccenic acid (TVA), promoted the ability of a type of immune system cell (CD8+ T lymphocytes) to infiltrate tumors and kill malignant cells. “Naturally, only 19% or 12% of dietary TVA can be converted to rumenic acid by humans or mice, respectively, so TVA is not a typical nutrient only for energy or as a building block for the biosynthesis of macromolecules. Our study shows that TVA has regulatory functions,” advances Chen.
Experiments with mice showed that introducing a diet enriched with this trans fat reduced the expansion capacity of melanoma and colon cancer tumor cells compared to those animals fed a control diet. The research also revealed that TVA-enriched diet helps CD8+ T cells better infiltrate tumors. “Our studies in mouse models demonstrate the antitumor activity of TVA by improving CD8+ T cell function. This justifies future clinical studies that use TVA as an adjunct to treatment for T cell-based immunotherapies,” defends Chen.
The scientists also tested what happened when some treatments with this nutrient were combined and found that dietary TVA added to a type of immunotherapy showed “a synergistic attenuation of tumor growth.” In another retrospective clinical study, the authors identified that patients with lymphoma who had higher levels of TVA responded better to CAR-T, another type of immunotherapy that consists of extracting T lymphocytes from patients to improve them in the laboratory and re-inject them into the body so that they better recognize and kill cancer cells. “These findings align with the idea that dietary TVA may improve clinical responsiveness to T cell-based immunotherapies,” the researchers suggest.
According to the authors, this study opens the door to further closely inspecting the potential health and disease implications of circulating nutrients. In the case of TVA, the scientists add, there are epidemiological studies that suggest that circulating levels of this trans fatty acid in humans are associated with less adiposity, lower risk of diabetes and less inflammation, although its effects on the risk of cancer and cardiovascular diseases are unclear. Chen admits that it is still unknown whether this nutrient can be harmful in other contexts or for other ailments, but insists: “TVA is not a bad trans fatty acid because previous studies showed that in models of dyslipidemia [alteración de los niveles de grasa en sangre] “In rodents, the TVA-enriched diet has hypolipidemic effects by reducing circulating triglycerides.”
Focus on the nutrient rather than the food
However, Chen and his team emphasize that we must try to understand in a “comprehensive” way all the influences and interactions that can occur between nutrients to choose the right diet. “Red meat consumption may provide TVA to improve antitumor immunity, but high red meat intake has been positively associated with the risk of many tumors, including breast or colorectal tumors,” they exemplify. The authors clarify, in fact, that what their studies support is “supplementation with TVA as a more specific and efficient way than dietary changes to benefit antitumor immunity.”
“Our results suggest that eating a balanced diet is probably good for your health. It might be more important to focus on the bioactivity of nutrients rather than individual foods; and taking supplements with enriched bioactive nutrients is probably more efficient than consuming foods containing these nutrients,” Chen agrees. The scientist assures that “as a natural food component, TVA has a high translation potential to be used as a dietary element or treatment complement in therapeutic approaches to improve clinical results.” And he gives several examples: “A combination of TVA and immune checkpoint inhibitors could be tested to improve immunotherapies to treat cancer patients. TVA can be combined with specific T cell activators, such as [el medicamento] blinatumomab, to treat patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or with CAR-T cells to improve efficacy in the treatment of cancer patients.”
Miguel Quintela, director of the Clinical Research Program of the National Center for Oncological Research (CNIO) and responsible for a spin-off (TCNterapia) of personalized oncological nutrition, warns that this study, although it is “a very important first observation”, no longer allows for giving a recommendation to the public: “I cannot recommend it to my patients with cancer eat a steak. “An experimental demonstration is one thing and another is to see in the long term whether it actually increases or decreases a pathology.” The oncologist admits that the results of the research, in which he has not participated, seem “robust”, but you have to know how to interpret and contextualize them, it is convenient. “Nowadays, you can’t make a list of pure nutrients and not eat anything other than that. Each nutrient is conveyed in foods of complex composition. The final consumer cannot isolate that nutrient from the meat. But this study opens up more fields of study,” he believes.
What this research does represent, in Quintela’s opinion, is a boost to precision nutrition. “We have to spin it much more finely,” he says. And he abounds: “[El TVA] It is a saturated trans acid, what nutrition experts tell us not to eat, and by itself it has lipid-lowering, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetogenic and antitumor capacity, promoting the antitumor immune response. In other words, it is a trans acid that is beneficial to health.” The oncologist offers a final reflection: “A food, in the end, is made up of hundreds of different molecules. Globally, the effect of red meat is likely to be bad, as demonstrated by many epidemiological studies. But that does not mean that it does not have specific nutrients that exert positive functions. Hence the need to make a precision approach and not with the generalities that we hear everywhere.”
Prudence with the results
Antoni Agudo, head of the Nutrition and Cancer Unit of the Catalan Institute of Oncology, considers that the study, of which he was not part, is “very well documented”, but makes a “call for caution” when interpreting the results: “ TVA is shown to have a fairly specific effect, which is the reprogramming of CD8+ T cells to activate immunity. But the immune system has many pathways of action and this is just one of them. This means that it may have potential in some types of tumors or in people who are following a specific treatment, but not in a generalized way in cancer.”
Furthermore, Agudo emphasizes, these findings are described “in animal experimental models and in human cells in vitro.” “There is a long distance from when the effects are seen in animals until they have an impact, if ever, in clinical practice.”
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