Study Finds Fatty Acid Inhibitor Alongside Chemotherapy Could Improve Treatment for Brain Metastases from Breast Cancer

A new study has found that “giving a fatty acid inhibitor alongside chemotherapy could improve the treatment efficacy for patients with brain metastases from triple-negative breast cancer.” Michigan Medicine's website has the news.

This research builds upon previous findings that show that “the brain microenvironment has very limited lipids available for cancer cells, making it critical for cancer cells to generate their own lipids to survive.” The findings showed that inhibiting fatty acid synthase, “an enzyme that produces fatty acids,” both improved the efficacy of chemotherapy and decreased cells’ ability to move and spread throughout the body.

The research team specifically looked for “synergy,” which is a “rigorous way to evaluate if two drugs work better together than separately,” in order to test the fatty acid synthase inhibitors in combination with chemotherapy. Their next goal will be to “understand how exactly metastases are impacted by inhibition of fatty acid synthase.”

Fatty acid synthase inhibition “has been found to be safe in phase 1 clinical trials, and is even used in non-cancer treatment of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, now called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease.”