Scientists at the Wistar Institute have found a surprising connection. It links fructose, a common sugar, to the spread of ovarian cancer. The study appeared in Nature Aging. It shows that cancer cells left behind after chemotherapy can send signals to nearby tumor cells. These signals help the tumor cells spread more easily.
Aidan Cole, Ph.D., led the research. He is a postdoctoral fellow working in Katherine Aird’s lab at Wistar. Cole explained that some cancer cells survive chemo but stop dividing. These cells are not dead. They stay active. They keep releasing molecules that communicate with nearby cells. This study is one of the first to show that a nutrient can be one of those signals. In this case, the nutrient is fructose.
Doctors almost always treat ovarian cancer with platinum-based chemotherapy. Many patients respond well at first. But the cancer usually comes back. When it does, it almost always spreads through the abdomen. This spread, known as metastasis, causes about 90% of deaths from the disease.
Earlier studies hinted that surviving cancer cells help the disease return. Part of the reason is that these cells release a mix of signaling molecules. Cole’s team designed a new kind of experiment to test this idea. They gathered the molecules released by chemo-surviving cells. On their own, these molecules boosted the spread of cancer cells. Cole noted that the finding may be the first time anyone showed this phenomenon in a living model, not just in a lab dish. The molecules themselves, not the cells, seemed to drive the spread.
That discovery pushed the team to find out exactly what was in the mix. They found the surviving cells were producing fructose and releasing it as a signal. This fructose encouraged nearby cancer cells to spread. The team also found something else. Even without chemotherapy, drinking large amounts of fructose, like the kind found in sugary drinks, can trigger the same spreading signal.
This is an important finding. Diet is something people can control. High fructose corn syrup constitutes a large share of daily calories for many Americans, sometimes reaching 8% to 20%. That is unlike many other cancer risk factors, which patients cannot change. Nobody has tested whether cutting back on fructose helps cancer patients directly. Still, the study suggests that diet might shape how cancer grows and spreads in ways scientists did not expect before.
Next, the researchers wanted to know how fructose causes this effect. They used several advanced lab techniques, including a CRISPR screen. They found that fructose lowers cholesterol levels inside nearby cells. Cholesterol acts like glue, helping cells stick together. Less cholesterol means cells can break free more easily and spread.
This finding has real implications for medicine. Statins are drugs that lower cholesterol. About 39 million people in the U.S. take them. The research team found that statins alone weakened the glue between cells, letting them escape more easily. The team is now studying whether statins might interfere with how well chemotherapy works. They stress that patients should not stop taking their statins because of this early finding.
Katherine Aird, the study’s senior author, pointed out an important detail. Ovarian cancer is most common in women past menopause. Many of these women already take statins for heart health. That overlap raises new questions worth exploring.
The team also suspects that this pattern extends beyond ovarian cancer. Aird said other cancers that spread inside the torso, like pancreatic, colon, and liver cancer, might behave the same way. She and Cole are now designing follow-up experiments. Their goal is to see if the same fructose-driven spread shows up in other cancer types.
