Cancer cells have distinct metabolic features compared to their healthy counterparts. Targeting the unique metabolic requirements provides new avenues for cancer therapy and drug development. While certain nutritional interventions have shown promise in specific contexts, how and to what extent nutrition inputs affect metabolism and cancer development and progression are largely unknown. Further, whether and how nutritional components can be harnessed to benefit current standard care for cancer patients demands both fundamental and practical answers.

My overall career goal is to investigate nutritional interventions for cancer prevention and treatment. Dietary methionine restriction (MR) promot...

Read More

Cancer cells have distinct metabolic features compared to their healthy counterparts. Targeting the unique metabolic requirements provides new avenues for cancer therapy and drug development. While certain nutritional interventions have shown promise in specific contexts, how and to what extent nutrition inputs affect metabolism and cancer development and progression are largely unknown. Further, whether and how nutritional components can be harnessed to benefit current standard care for cancer patients demands both fundamental and practical answers.

My overall career goal is to investigate nutritional interventions for cancer prevention and treatment. Dietary methionine restriction (MR) promotes metabolic health, extends mammalian lifespan, and has shown promise against cancer. It is more palatable than other alternatives with no obvious clinical side effects. I have previously shown that dietary MR alters plasma methionine effectively in both mice and humans. MR exerts anti-tumor effects in RAS-driven colorectal cancer patient-derived xenografts models and a GEMM sarcoma model alone or in combination with the standard care 5-Fluorouracil and radiation, respectively. However, the mechanisms by which dietary MR mediate tumor outcome are not fully clear.

The goals of this CPRIT award are to:

1. Better understand the mechanisms by which MR mediates tumor inhibition
2. Provide preclinical evidence for application of MR in clinical cancer treatment
3. Identify novel candidate metabolites and microbial species for therapeutic targets

The objectives for this proposal are to dissect the metabolic mechanisms underlying MR mediated beneficial tumor outcomes in CRC models (Aim 1), to define the role of microbiota in MR-mediated tumor inhibition (Aim2), and then to explore the potential of MR as adjunct therapy along with chemotherapy (Aim 3).

Read Less