Scientists at the University of Minnesota have found a promising new way to improve cancer treatment by using a vitamin most people already know—vitamin B3. This vitamin, also called nicotinamide, helped make the body’s natural killer cells stronger and better at attacking cancer.
Natural killer cells are part of our immune system. They act like tiny bodyguards, looking for infected or damaged cells and destroying them before they can cause harm. In the past, doctors have tried to use these cells to fight blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.
But the results were mixed, especially for patients whose cancer didn’t respond to other treatments. Scientists knew they needed to find a way to make these cells more powerful and longer-lasting.
That’s where vitamin B3 came in. In this new study, researchers treated natural killer cells with vitamin B3 in the lab. The result? These cells became tougher, more active, and better at finding and killing cancer cells. They lasted longer in the body, which gave them more time to do their job.
The team also tested a combination of these boosted natural killer cells with a cancer-fighting drug. They gave this treatment to 30 patients, including 19 with a difficult form of lymphoma.
After just 28 days, 11 of those 19 patients showed complete recovery, and three more showed partial recovery. These early results are very encouraging and suggest that the treatment could be a big help for people with hard-to-treat blood cancers.
Vitamin B3 is not new in the world of health. Back in the 1930s, scientists discovered that a lack of vitamin B3 caused a serious disease called pellagra. Symptoms included skin problems, diarrhea, and even dementia. Adding the vitamin to the diet helped prevent this illness. Now, the same vitamin might play a role in cancer care.
In this study, vitamin B3 didn’t just give natural killer cells more energy. It also protected them from damage and made them last longer in the body. That gave them more time to find and kill cancer cells effectively.
What’s next for this research? The scientists want to test the treatment in larger clinical trials to confirm the results. If those trials go well, this vitamin-enhanced immune therapy could become a powerful new option for treating blood cancers—especially for patients who don’t respond to current treatments.
This discovery is a reminder that sometimes, simple tools like vitamins can be used in powerful new ways. The full study was published in Science Translational Medicine.
If you care about cancer risk, please read studies that exercise may stop cancer in its tracks, and vitamin D can cut cancer death risk.
For more health information, please see recent studies that yogurt and high-fiber diet may cut lung cancer risk, and results showing that new cancer treatment may reawaken the immune system.
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