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Starving leukemia to induce differentiation

Nature Medicine volume 23, pages 14–15 (2017)Cite this article

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A new study shows that fasting induces the differentiation and elimination of some types of leukemia in mice, which implicates fasting or its mimetics as a novel strategy for the treatment of this disease.

Acute leukemias, characterized by the excess production of hematopoietic progenitor cells of the lymphoid (acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL) or myeloid lineages (acute myeloid leukemia, AML), are among the most common causes of childhood cancer worldwide. Both ALL and AML are challenging to treat because subsets of patients fail to respond to conventional therapies, such as chemotherapy or radiation, as well as to targeted therapies, such as tyrosine-kinase inhibitors and bone marrow transplantation1. In this issue of Nature Medicine, Lu et al.2 explore the therapeutic potential of fasting (i.e., food deprivation without water restriction), a dietary intervention that has been previously proposed to promote normal hematopoietic regeneration3, as a treatment for acute leukemia. Their findings reveal that periodic fasting selectively inhibits the development of ALL, but not AML, by upregulating the leptin receptor (LEPR) protein and its downstream effector PR-domain zinc-finger protein 1 (PRDM1).

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Figure 1: Fasting regulates LEPR-mediated leukemia differentiation.

Marina Corral Spence / Springer Nature

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chia-Wei Cheng and Ömer H. Yilmaz are at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Chia-Wei Cheng & Ömer H Yilmaz

  2. Ömer H. Yilmaz is also in the Department of Pathology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Ömer H Yilmaz

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  1. Chia-Wei Cheng
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  2. Ömer H Yilmaz
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Correspondence to Ömer H Yilmaz.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Cheng, CW., Yilmaz, Ö. Starving leukemia to induce differentiation. Nat Med 23, 14–15 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.4259

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