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Cancer cells protein 'barf' opens immunotherapy possibilities

March 13, 2026
March 13, 2026

Good morning. Angus Chen, STAT's cancer reporter, here.

Something I've noted among patients, just anecdotally, is that many seem drawn to the idea that changing their diet or other lifestyle could improve their outcomes. I think this makes intuitive sense, since being able to take agency in something is comforting in a situation so far outside your control.

I'm thinking about this because a paper came out yesterday in CANCER featuring randomized patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer starting a medically supervised ketogenic diet or a usual diet. It was a small study of just 32 patients (and didn't reach statistical significance), so take it with a grain of salt. The 16 patients who were randomized to a medically supervised ketogenic diet had a median PFS of 8.5 months versus 6.2 months on a usual diet. All patients received gemcitabine, nab-paclitaxel, and cisplatin chemotherapy.

The idea behind this is that cancer cells have certain metabolic vulnerabilities, with roots in Otto Warburg's 1920s observation that cancer cells seem to rely more on glucose than healthy cells. But this study, like others in similar veins, suggests that there still isn't great evidence that restricting glucose in your diet will substantially starve cancer. That might be because, as I've written about in the past, cancer metabolism is still quite flexible and cancer cells can use other methods to generate energy.

Still, there are ways that people are trying to target cancer metabolism. Some are looking for pharmaceutical routes, like developing inhibitors that can block multiple metabolic pathways in cancer cells. Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of the Emperor Of All Maladies, co-founded a company focused on cancer metabolism called Faeth Therapeutics as well.

The Src protein was unexpectedly found on the outside of tumor cells.
LINDA BARTLETT / NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

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