Dietary link found to drug-resistant breast cancer
Drug resistance is the leading cause of death in women with estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, the most common form of the disease. Now, researchers have identified an ordinary dietary element that may increase the chances of a breast cancer becoming drug-resistant. The connection of the amino acid leucine — found in foods such as beef, pork, chicken, fish, dairy products, and beans — to drug resistance raises hopes that a relatively simple intervention, like a shift to a low-leucine diet, can reduce the incidence of drug resistance, which is responsible for a large portion of the roughly 40,000 breast cancer deaths every year. The work also raises the possibility that a drug could be developed to mirror the effects of that dietary restriction, by blocking cells’ ability to take in leucine from the surrounding environment. Senthil Muthuswamy, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the cell biology program at...