Pancreatic Cancers Use Fructose to Fuel Their Growth

Pancreatic cancers use the sugar fructose to activate a key cellular pathway that drives cell division, helping the cancer to grow more quickly, a study by researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center found. The study appears in Cancer Research.

Although it’s widely known that cancers use glucose to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between fructose and cancer proliferation, says Anthony Heaney, MD, an associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and senior author of the study.

“The bottom line is the modern diet contains a lot of refined sugar including fructose and it’s a hidden danger implicated in a lot of modern diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver,” says Heaney. “In this study, we show that cancers can use fructose just as readily as glucose to fuel their growth.”

In his study, Heaney and his team took pancreatic tumors from patients and cultured and grew the malignant cells in petri dishes. They then added glucose to one set of cells and fructose to another. Using mass spectrometry, they were able to follow the carbon-labeled sugars in the cells to determine what exactly they were being used for and how.

Heaney found that the pancreatic cancer cells could easily distinguish between glucose and fructose even though they are very similar structurally, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the cancer cells metabolized the sugars in very different ways. In the case of fructose, the pancreatic cancer cells used the sugar in the transketolase-driven non-oxidative pentose phosphate pathway to generate nucleic acids, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, which the cancer cells need to divide and proliferate.

“Traditionally, glucose and fructose have been considered as interchangeable monosaccharide substrates that are similarly metabolized, and little attention has been given to sugars other than glucose,” the study stated. “However, fructose intake has increased dramatically in recent decades and cellular uptake of glucose and fructose uses distinct transporters ... these findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation. They have major significance for cancer patients, given dietary refined fructose consumption.”

Source: UCLA Health Sciences