The international team of researchers led by Elena Goun, associate professor of chemistry at MU, discovered that high levels of NR could not only increase someone’s risk of developing triple-negative breast cancer, but could also cause the cancer to metastasize, or spread in the brain. . Once the cancer reaches the brain, the results are fatal because there are currently no viable treatment options, said Goun, who is the study’s corresponding author.
Some people get them [vitamins and supplements] because they automatically assume that vitamins and supplements have only positive health benefits, but very little is known about how they actually work. Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions about how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”
Elena Gunn, associate professor of chemistry at MU
Following the death of her 59-year-old father, just three months after being diagnosed with colon cancer, Gunn was moved by her father’s death to pursue a better scientific understanding of cancer metabolism, or the energy through which cancer spreads in the body. Since NR is a known supplement that helps increase cellular energy levels, and cancer cells feed off of this energy with their increased metabolism, Goun wanted to investigate the role of NR in cancer growth and spread. “Our work is particularly important given the wide commercial availability and large number of ongoing human clinical trials where NR is used to mitigate the side effects of cancer treatment in patients,” Gunn said. The researchers used this technology to compare and examine how much NR was present in cancer cells, T cells and healthy tissues. “While NR is already widely used in humans and is being explored in so many ongoing clinical trials for additional applications, much of how NR works is a black box—it’s not understood,” Goun said. “This inspired us to come up with this new imaging technique based on ultra-sensitive bioluminescence imaging that allows real-time quantification of NR levels in a non-invasive way. The presence of NR is seen with light, and the brighter it is, the more NR is present.” . Gunn said the study’s findings underscore the importance of carefully investigating potential side effects for supplements like NR before using them in people who may have different types of health conditions. In the future, Goun would like to provide information that could potentially lead to the development of certain inhibitors to help make cancer treatments such as chemotherapy more effective in treating cancer. The key to this approach, Goun said, is to look at it from an individualized medical perspective. “Not all cancers are the same in every person, especially in terms of metabolic signatures,” Goun said. “Often cancers can even change their metabolism before or after chemotherapy.” “A bioluminescence-based probe for in vivo non-invasive monitoring of nicotinamide riboside uptake reveals a link between metastasis and NAD+ metabolism” was published in the Journal of Biosensors and Bioelectronics. Funding was provided by grants from the European Research Council (ERC-2019-COG, 866338) and the Swiss National Foundation (51NF40_185898), as well as support from NCCR Chemical Biology. Other authors include Arkadiy Bazhin, Pavlo Khodakivsky, Ekaterina Solodnikova and Alexey Yevtodiyenko at MU. Tamara Maric at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Greta Maria Paola Giordano Attianese, George Coukos and Melita Irving at The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Switzerland. and Magali Joffraud and Carles Cantó at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Switzerland. Bazhin, Khodakivskyi, Mikhaylov, Solodnikova, Yevtodiyenko and Goun are also affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mikhaylov, Yevtodiyenko and Goun are also connected to SwissLumix SARL. Source: University of Missouri-Columbia Journal Reference: 10.1016/j.bios.2022.114826
