“Often times cancers can even change their metabolism before or after chemotherapy.” Controversy “Not all cancers are the same in every person, especially from the standpoint of metabolic signatures,” Goun said. The key to this approach, Goun said, is to look at it from a personalized medicine standpoint.

In the future, Goun would like to provide information that could potentially lead to the development of certain inhibitors to help make cancer therapies like chemotherapy more effective in treating cancer. Goun said the findings of the study emphasize the importance of having careful investigations of potential side effects for supplements like NR prior to their use in people who may have different types of health conditions.

The presence of NR is shown with light, and the brighter the light is, the more NR is present.” “So that inspired us to come up with this novel imaging technique based on ultrasensitive bioluminescent imaging that allows quantification of NR levels in real time in a non-invasive manner. “While NR is already being widely used in people and is being investigated in so many ongoing clinical trials for additional applications, much of how NR works is a black box - it’s not understood,” Goun said. The researchers used this technology to compare and examine how much NR levels were present in cancer cells, T cells, and healthy tissues. “Our work is especially important given the wide commercial availability and a large number of ongoing human clinical trials where NR is used to mitigate the side effects of cancer therapy in patients,” Goun said. Since NR is a known supplement for helping increase levels of cellular energy, and cancer cells feed off of that energy with their increased metabolism, Goun wanted to investigate NR’s role in the development and spread of cancer.Įlena Goun.

“Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions surrounding how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”įollowing the death of her 59-year-old father only three months after being diagnosed with colon cancer, Goun was moved by her father’s passing to pursue a better scientific understanding of cancer metabolism, or the energy through which cancer spreads in the body. “Some people take them because they automatically assume that vitamins and supplements only have positive health benefits, but very little is known about how they actually work,” Goun said. She said that once the cancer reaches the brain, the results are deadly because no viable treatment options exist at this time. The international team of researchers was led by Elena Goun, an associate professor of chemistry at MU and the corresponding author on the study. Scientists discovered that high levels of NR could not only increase someone’s risk of developing triple-negative breast cancer, but also could cause the cancer to metastasize or spread to the brain.

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