Mannose sugar is a nutritional supplement.
A recent study from the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute found that this sugar could slow tumor growth and improve the effects of chemotherapy with multiple types of cancer.
The study is one step towards understanding how mannose could be used to help treat cancer.
Previous research has shown that tumors use more glucose than normal, healthy tissues. But it is very hard to control the amount of glucose in your body through diet alone.
In the study, the team found that mannose could interfere with glucose to reduce how much sugar cancer cells can use.
Because tumors need a lot of glucose to grow, limiting the amount they can use should slow cancer progression.
But the problem is that normal tissues need glucose as well, so scientists can’t completely remove it from the body.
Luckily, the researchers found a dosage of mannose that could block enough glucose to slow tumor growth, but not so much that normal tissues were affected.
They examined how mice with pancreatic, lung or skin cancer responded when mannose was added to their drinking water and given as an oral treatment.
The results showed that the supplement strongly slowed down the growth of tumors and did not cause any obvious side effects.
The team also found mannose could affect cancer treatment, including cisplatin and doxorubicin, two of the most widely used chemotherapy drugs.
They found that mannose enhanced the effects of chemotherapy, slowing tumor growth, reducing the size of tumors and even increasing the lifespan in mice.
Several other cancer types, including leukemia, osteosarcoma, ovarian and bowel cancer, were also examined.
The team’s next step is checking why treatment only works in some cells so that they can work out which patients might benefit the most from this approach.
One author of the study is Professor Kevin Ryan.
The study is published in Nature.
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