Researchers uncover how obesity leads to cancer in epithelial cells

To investigate how obesity may affect this mechanism, lead author Yasuyuki Fujita and colleagues bred mice that expressed a cancer-inducing mutant protein called Ras.

Potentially cancerous cells that have been transformed by Ras are usually eliminated by epithelial cells.

As reported in the journal Cell Reports, the researchers fed the mice a high-fat diet, which led to severe obesity and resulted in suppression of the EDAC mechanism. This causes the Ras-transformed cells that remained in the tissue to grow.

Suppression of the defence mechanism was only observed in the intestine and pancreas and not in the lungs, a finding that supports previous studies reporting correlations between intestinal and pancreatic cancer, but not lung cancer.