Popular dietary supplement linked to cancer risk, brain metastases

Popular dietary supplement linked to cancer risk, brain metastases

While previous studies have linked commercial supplements such as nicotinamide riboside (NR), a form of vitamin B3, to benefits related to cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological health, new research from the University of Missouri has found that NR may actually increase the risk of serious diseases, including the development of cancer.

The international team of researchers led by Elena Goun, an associate professor of chemistry at MU, discovered that high levels of NR could not only increase a person's risk of developing triple-negative breast cancer, but could also cause the cancer to metastasize, or spread to the brain. Once the cancer reaches the brain, the results are fatal because there are currently no viable treatment options, said Goun, the study's corresponding author.

Some people take them [vitamins and supplements] because they automatically assume that vitamins and supplements only have positive health benefits, but very little is known about how they actually work. Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to investigate the fundamental questions of how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”

Elena Goun, associate professor of chemistry at MU

Following the death of her 59-year-old father just three months after being diagnosed with colon cancer, Goun was moved by her father's death to pursue a better scientific understanding of cancer metabolism, or the energy by which cancer spreads throughout the body. Since NR is a well-known dietary supplement that helps increase levels of cellular energy, and cancer cells feed on this energy with their increased metabolism, Goun wanted to investigate the role of NR in the development and spread of cancer.

“Our work is particularly important given the wide commercial availability and large number of ongoing human clinical trials using NR to mitigate the side effects of cancer therapy in patients,” Goun said.

The researchers used this technology to compare and study how much NR levels were present in cancer cells, T cells and healthy tissue.

“While NR is already widely used in humans and is being studied for additional applications in so many ongoing clinical trials, much of how NR works is a black box – it is not understood,” Goun said. "This inspired us to develop this novel imaging technique based on ultra-sensitive bioluminescence imaging that enables non-invasive quantification of NR levels in real time. The presence of NR is indicated with light, and the brighter the light, the more NR is present."

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Goun said the study's results underscore the importance of carefully examining possible side effects of dietary supplements such as NR before using them in people with different health conditions. In the future, Goun would like to provide information that could potentially lead to the development of specific inhibitors to make cancer therapies such as chemotherapy more effective in treating cancer. The key to this approach, Goun said, is to look at it from the standpoint of personalized medicine.

“Not all cancers are the same in every person, especially from a metabolic signature standpoint,” Goun said. “Cancers can often even change their metabolism before or after chemotherapy.”

“A bioluminescence-based probe for non-invasive in vivo 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 Science Foundation (51NF40_185898), as well as support from NCCR Chemical Biology.

Other authors of the study include Arkadiy Bazhin, Pavlo Khodakivskyi, Ekaterina Solodnikova and Aleksey Yevtodiyenko from MU; Tamara Maric at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; Greta Maria Paola Giordano Attianese, George Coukos and Melita Irving from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Switzerland; and Magali Jofffraud and Carles Cantó at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Switzerland. Bazhin, Khodakivskyi, Mikhaylov, Solodnikova, Yevtodiyenko and Goun are also affiliated with the Federal Institute of Technology. Mikhaylov, Yevtodiyenko and Goun are also affiliated with SwissLumix SARL in Switzerland.

Source:

University of Missouri-Columbia

Reference:

Maric, T., et al. (2022) A bioluminescence-based probe for non-invasive in vivo monitoring of nicotinamide riboside uptake reveals a link between metastasis and NAD+ metabolism. Biosensors and bioelectronics. doi.org/10.1016/j.bios.2022.114826.

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