ABOVE: Fat cells
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The paper
J. Huang et al., “Adipocyte p62/SQSTM1 suppresses tumorigenesis through opposite regulations of metabolism in adipose tissue and tumor,” Cancer Cell, 33:770–84, 2018.
Obesity is second only to smoking as the biggest preventable cause of cancer in the US. It’s linked not only to cancer incidence, but also to disease progression and outcome. So understanding how fat tissue communicates with tumor cells in vivo has long been a goal for cancer researchers.
To do that, most groups “give mice a high-fat diet and see how the tumor grows,” says Jorge Moscat, who studies cancer metabolism at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California. But this diet triggers multiple, confounding effects on mouse metabolism, he adds. He and his colleagues decided to try another approach: selectively knocking out the gene for an autophagy-promoting protein in the adipocytes of a transgenic mouse model ...
