Liposuction and plastic surgery, in the simplest of terms, is the act of taking fat out of the body and putting it back in certain places to sculpt the body as a person wishes. This idea has been the launching pad for a revolutionary treatment that has successfully fought off five different types of cancer in lab experiments.
Scientists have used this cosmetic surgery approach to take out white fat cells, genetically engineered these cells into beige fat cells and inject it back into the body. These beige cells are able to outcompete cancer cells for resources, even when implanted far from the tumour site.
Essentially, the beige cells starve the malignant bodies to death. And its ability to affect tumours far from its implant site means it could even treat hard to reach tumours like those in the brain.
Researchers at UC San Francisco used CRISPR to engineer these unique, beige fat cells. Rather just storing calories like ordinary white fat cells, the beige cells ravenously consume calories faster than cancer cells do.
It’s barely entered human testing phases but the treatment is already a step ahead of other cancer breakthroughs. Unlike other experimental treatments, the viability of the fat transfer procedure used in the treatment has already been perfected in humans through decades of progress in the plastic surgery industry.
Senior author on the paper, Nadav Ahituv, PhD, explained: “We already routinely remove fat cells with liposuction and put them back via plastic surgery. These fat cells can be easily manipulated in the lab and safely placed back into the body, making them an attractive platform for cellular therapy, including for cancer.”
Ahituv’s breakthrough yielded such great results, the scientists were convinced “we had messed something up” during their first petri dish experiment but after repeating it multiple times, they realised the treatment was just that good. They then moved onto mice models which also showed success
The paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, revealed the beige fat cells were able to conquer two different types of breast cancer cells as well as colon, pancreatic and prostate cancer cells in petri dishes. When they moved up to mice experiments, the fat cells still successfully starved breast, pancreatic and prostate cancer cells.
It even suppressed cancer cells in mice that had a genetic predisposition to the disease. Trials using human breast cancer mastectomies showed a patient’s own genetically engineered fat was able to starve its own breast cancer cells.
But it’s not just cancer treatment the author has his eye on: “We think these cells could also be designed to sense glucose in the bloodstream and release insulin, for diabetes, or suck up iron in diseases where there’s excessive iron, like hemochromatosis. The sky’s the limit for these fat cells.”