Will palmitic acid give you cancer or fuel metastasis?

Again thanks to Mike Eades for the full text of this paper and to Marco for poking me about it.

Targeting metastasis-initiating cells through the fatty acid receptor CD36

The executive summary: Both feeding a high fat diet to mice then implanting a certain type of cancer cells or feeding palmitic acid to that certain type of cancer cells pre-implantation makes the cancer much more aggressive once implanted. Up-regulating CD36 (described as a fatty acid transporter) has the same effect.

So. The question is: Should we all abandon high fat diets because fat, particularly palmitic acid, appears to be a promoter of aggressive metastasis?

I have thee things I'd just like to discuss.

I suppose the first is CD36. This is long accepted as a fatty acid transporter which facilitates the entry of FFAs in to those cells which express it on their surface. As far as I was aware this was all it did. My bad. The authors do mention that it promotes the uptake of other substances, including oxLDL, as an aside (they didn't look at this) and they do cite Hale's study using glioblastoms, which is rather more explicit about what CD36 really is:

Cancer stem cell-specific scavenger receptor CD36 drives glioblastoma progression.

"We confirmed oxidized phospholipids, ligands of CD36, were present in GBM [glioblastomas] and found that the proliferation of CSCs [cancer stem cells], but not non-CSCs, increased with exposure to oxidized low-density lipoprotein".

CD36 is a scaveneger receptor which promotes the uptake of all sorts of lipids and oxidised phospholipids. Of course you can't help but think of 13-HODE and all of the other oxidised omega 6 PUFA derivatives which might or might not have been available to be taken up using extra CD36 receptors. This was not the point of the study, the study was aimed at nailing palmitic acid, to which I will return.

The second point relates to the mice fed the high fat diet.

The mice were fed TD.06414, essentially the same as D12492. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the metabolic effects!

Lard and sucrose/maltodextrin, designed to produce obesity, hyperglycaemia, hyperinsulinaemia and hyperleptinaemia. No one measured the linoleic acid content of the diet so we can assume, very safely, that the approximate 16% of PUFA in the fat suggested by the manufacturer, is a gross under estimate. No one would expect a diet like this to be anything other than cancer promoting. Throwing in a few extra CD36s will make it worse. Is palmitate the problem in these "high fat" fed mice or is it 13-HODE, other PUFA oxidation products, insulin or leptin?

Point three is the one I'm currently interested in.

Pre incubation of the CD36+ cancer cells with 400micromolar unadulterated palmitic acid, for just 48 hours pre-implantation, promotes markedly increased metastasis when they are injected in to the mouse model. No PUFA, no 13-HODE, no hyperinsulinaemia. Just palmitic acid.

This is undoubtedly the money shot for the research group.

Now, what is going on here? From the focus of my blogging at the moment it's clear that palmitic acid is the highest driver of FADH2 input in to the ETC short of stearic acid. What will 48 hours of high level, uncontrolled FADH2 drive do to reverse electron transport (RET) and the structural integrity of complex I?

This is a model. A concentration of 400micromol palmitate, with no other FFAs, just never happens in real life. This model of extreme palmitate induced RET will force mitochondria to disassemble a pathological amount of their complex I. That's pretty obvious from the work of Guarás. The function of complex I is to reduce the NADH:NAD+ ratio and so disassembling complex I will do the inverse and raise NADH per unit NAD+. I went through the relevance of changes in this ratio, specifically for the generation of aggressive metastatic cancer phenotypes, in 2013 when I posted about Hoffer and B3 therapy for cancer prophylaxis and the modern versions using all of the clever stuff we do nowadays.

Of course you have to wonder about point two above; how much of the cancer promoting effect of obesity might be from the pathology of concurrently elevated fatty acids (reducing complex I availability so NAD+ generation) combined with elevated glucose (supplying the maximum amount of NADH) acting via the NADH:NAD+ ratio, never mind 13-HODE etc. A double whammy.

Personally I'm not about to give up eating butter on the basis of this paper. But that's just me I guess.

Peter

BTW, will blocking CD36 be an anti-cancer adjunct? Quite possibly, especially if it blocks 13-HODE entry in to the cell. Or even if it blocks FFA entry when people can't be ars*d to avoid hyperglycaemia while ever they have chronically elevated FFAs.