The annual Chicago Cancer Congress opens this Friday. The greatest advances on cancer will be presented there and there are some, like this discovery by French researchers. They have just brought to light the role of iron or copper in the development of tumors and metastases.
We don’t necessarily know it, but there are all kinds of metals in the human body. As in the first place iron, which allows us to breathe, copper too. There is also “nickel, zinc, magnesium, calciumexplains Raphaël Rodriguez, researcher at the CNRS and the Institut Curie in Paris. These trace elements in the broad sense of the term are provided by food. VSThey are kind of the poor relations of biology because metals are harder to study than proteins or nucleic acids. A metal is much smaller than a DNA molecule or a protein”.
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A French team of researchers has worked on the metals found naturally in the human body and has just demonstrated the role of copper and iron in the development of tumors and metastases. This is a major discovery, like the great advances in research that will be presented from this Friday at the Annual Cancer Congress in Chicago, a benchmark congress.
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Until now, the role these metals play in cancer has been little studied. Today, Dr. Raphaël Rodriguez’s team demonstrates that iron, copper and the chemical reactions in which they are involved have a harmful effect in the event of cancer. “It increases the size of the tumor, the ability of cells to form metastases. We find it hard to believe it ourselves, it’s brand new”he admits.
Anti-metastatic molecules to compensate for the effects of iron?
This breakthrough has just been published in the prestigious American scientific journal Nature. Now that researchers know the effect of metals in cancer, a question arises: should copper and especially iron intake be reduced for cancer patients? The answer of Dr Raphaël Rodriguez: “No longer giving iron is complicated because we need it for the body’s vital functions, but there is a way to give it, especially in patients who suffer from anemia. And then, there are certain molecules that exist in the clinic for other treatments, other diseases such as metformin which is used for type 2 diabetes, which can have an anti-inflammatory effect and an anti-metastatic effect”.
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These drugs against diabetes already exist, the objective is to design new ones. Raphaël Rodriguez hopes to achieve this in his laboratories at the Curie Anticancer Institute. “The specificity of this laboratory is to have an infrastructure where we can do chemical synthesis, cell culture, experiments, and a molecular biology laboratory which allows us to do cell biology”, describes the researcher. After analyzing the role of copper and iron on cancers, the field of research remains vast. Among the next steps, there is the analysis of the effects of manganese, cobalt, nickel and even zinc.