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Adding a pre-ketone supplement — a component of a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet — to a type of cancer therapy in a laboratory setting was highly effective for treating prostate cancer, researchers from the University of Notre Dame found.
Recently published online in the journal Cancer Research, the study from Xin Lu, the John M. and Mary Jo Boler Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and collaborators tackled a problem oncologists have battled: Prostate cancer is resistant to a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy. ICB therapy blocks certain proteins from binding with other proteins and paves the way for our body’s fighter cells, T cells, to kill the cancer.
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“Prostate cancer is the most common cancer for American men, and immunotherapy has been really influential in some other cancers, like melanoma or lung cancer, but it hasn’t been working almost at all for prostate cancer,” said Lu, who is affiliated with the Boler-Parseghian Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases. Adding a dietary supplement might overcome this resistance, the lead author in the study, Sean Murphy, suggested.
Murphy, a ’24 alumnus who was a doctoral student in Lu’s lab, had been following a keto diet himself. Knowing that cancer cells feed off of sugar, he decided that depriving mouse models of carbohydrates — a key component of the keto diet — might prevent cancer growth.
He divided the models into different groups: immunotherapy alone, ketogenic diet alone, a pre-ketone supplement alone, the ketogenic diet with the immunotherapy, the supplement with the immunotherapy, and the control. While the immunotherapy alone had almost no effect on the tumors (just like what happens to most patients with prostate…