A group of international researchers from Israel and Scotland have made a breakthrough that may improve the treatment preventing metastatic leukemia spreading to the brain.
Experts from Schneider Children’s Medical Center and Tel Aviv University, along with scientists from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Glasgow discovered in their research, published in Nature Cancer, a drug that thwarts the production of fatty acids, used by leukemia to spread, thereby blocking the spread of the disease to the brain by only affecting the leukemia cells and not the brain cells.
Their research focuses on acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common type of cancer among children. Since one of the main risks of ALL is that the cancer will metastasize to the brain, children diagnosed with this disease receive a prophylactic treatment that protects the brain from metastasized cells.
Although the recovery rates for this disease are relatively high, the harsh treatment for this cancer - consisting of injecting chemotherapy drugs into the spinal fluid, and sometimes also radiation to the skull - carries the risk of side effects of damaged brain function that can persist for years after the patient is cured, since these drugs also harm healthy brain cells.
For the first time ever, the current research reveals that the solution lies in fatty acids, which are an essential resource for cells, especially leukemia cells.
Leukemia cells obtain sufficient fatty acids in the bone marrow and blood, but when they travel to the brain in a metastatic process, they reach an area that is lacking sufficient fatty acids.
According to the recently published research, in order to continue to thrive and develop in the brain, the ALL cells develop an ability to produce fatty acids on their own.
Based on these findings, the researchers pointed out that treating the patient with drugs that block the production of fatty acids will prevent the leukemia cells from producing fatty acids and will thereby “starve” them and stop them from flourishing in the brain.
Indeed, the use of such drugs in mice - as these drugs have yet to be approved for testing on humans - has stopped the spread of metastatic leukemia to their brains.
This research, which demonstrates that cancer cells adapt to the organs to which they spread, paves the way for biological treatments that block these adaptation mechanisms, thereby stopping the cancer cells from metastasizing.