According to McMaster University researchers, powering up fat cells in the bone marrow could help indirectly kill acute myeloid leukemia cells. The findings were published today in Nature Cell Biology.
"Our approach represents a different way of looking at leukemia and considers the entire bone marrow as an ecosystem, rather than the traditional approach of studying and trying to directly kill the diseased cells themselves," said Allison Boyd, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow with the research institute and first author of the study.
The study was conducted over the three and half years and started from observations of leukemia patients. This led to the collection of bone marrow samples from cohorts of patients so that the researchers could study and image individual leukemia cells. They then compared these leukemia cells to healthy control cells in the bone marrow, which is what revealed the effects of targeting fat cells.
The production of healthy red blood cells is critical for those with acute myeloid leukemia but is sometimes overlooked as many other treatments focus on killing the leukemia cells alone. In this work, the scientists used a diabetes drug that induced fat cell production in bone marrow and saw that it helped foster a red blood cell population as well as suppress leukemic disease.
"The fact that we can target one cell type in one tissue using an existing drug makes us excited about the possibilities of testing this in patients," said group leader Mick Bhatia, Ph.D., director and senior scientist with the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute.
Bhatia envisions that this new approach could be added to existing leukemia treatments or even replace others.
Image: These are fat cells (white circles) in the healthy human bone marrow, left, compared to bone marrow in a patient with leukemia, right. Image courtesy of McMaster University.