Calorie-restricted diets are thought to protect against cancer and slow tumor growth, and a new study published in this week's Nature begins to tease out why the measure works for some tumors, and not for others.
For almost a century, researchers have known that fasting helps animals live longer and avoid some cancers, "but which type of cancers would be amenable to this approach, from a therapeutic standpoint, is still an open question," said Pier Paolo Pandolfi, a cancer geneticist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center in Boston, Mass., who was not involved in the study. The study is exciting because it is one of the first to start answering that question at the genetic level, he said. A team led by David Sabatini, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and molecular biologist at the Whitehead Institute...
 |
Image: Gaetan_lee/flickr |
Interested in reading more?
Become a Member of
Receive full access to more than 35 years of archives, as well as TS Digest, digital editions of The Scientist, feature stories, and much more!
