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February 08, 2020
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Cedars-Sinai receives $9.1 million for liver cancer research

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The National Cancer Institute awarded a Cedars-Sinai team $9.1 million by to study how cancer metastasizes to the liver and finding ways to block it. Consisting of four parts, the study’s main focus will be the interaction between dietary fat and fatty liver disease as well as the mechanisms that allow for the spread, according to a press release.

“The liver is the second-most common site, after lymph nodes, to which cancer spreads. The majority of patients that die of pancreatic, colon or prostate cancer develop liver metastases at the time of death,” Neil Bhowmick, PhD, director of the Cancer Biology Program at Cedars-Sinai said in the release. “While the liver is the primary organ of metastasis from pancreatic and colon cancers, the relatively rare incidence of prostate cancer metastasis to the liver has the worst outcome. The liver – whose primary function is to filter the blood coming from the digestive tract, detoxify chemicals, metabolize drugs and excrete bile – plays a role in other cancers as well.”

With prior evidence indicating that having fat in the liver promotes cancer spread, the first two projects will study how the short-term and long-term effects of high-fat diets alter the pathways that make this specific organ more susceptible to metastatic cancer and how the fatty-liver cells influence the non-fatty liver cells. The third project will study the role of fatty liver on inflammation, examining specific signaling pathways that control cell behavior. The final project will look at MAT1A, MAT2A and MAT2B, the three proteins that influence liver metastasis.

Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, dean of the Medical Faculty at Cedars-Sinai, said in the release, “We are grateful for the generous support of the National Institutes of Health, which will help our expert team of scientists and clinicians break new ground as they learn why certain cancers inevitably spread to the liver, and find ways to halt that process.”