by Johanna Weidner, The Record
Avocados may hold the secret to combating a deadly form of cancer, a Waterloo researcher has discovered.
Paul Spagnuolo, a professor in the University of Waterloo’s school of pharmacy, isolated a lipid in avocados that can treat acute myeloid leukemia by targeting the leukemia stem cells, which is what causes many patients to relapse.
“It’s an exciting time,” Spagnuolo said. “It’s very promising what we’re doing.”
Spagnuolo’s research was published Monday in Cancer Research, a top oncology journal.
He also filed a patent application to use the compound to treat acute myeloid leukemia and is already performing experiments to prepare the drug for clinical trial.
Derived from avocados, it is “quite potent and selective at killing leukemia and leukemia stem cells.”
The stem cells are critical in the development of the disease and outcome for the patient. Yet, he said, current chemotherapy doesn’t eliminate these cells.
“The disease will end up coming back,” Spagnuolo said. “There’s very limited treatment options once a patient has relapsed.”
Acute myeloid leukemia is fatal within five years for 90 per cent of people over 65, and children can get it as well.
Treatment has been about the same for the last 30 years, pushing researchers like Spagnuolo to look for promising new drugs.
“There’s a real drive to discover the new molecule,” he said.
“We were very interested in identifying a molecule that was more selective.”
He likened treating this type of cancer to pulling a weed. If you don’t get the roots out too, the weed will come back — and that’s like the leukemia stem cells.
The avocado-derived compound, called avocatin B, blocks the ability of the stem cells to use fat for energy, basically starving them. Research found it was 10 to 100 times more powerful than an experimental molecule that used the same pathway.
Targeted treatment also reduces the side-effects that are caused by damage to healthy cells.
Spagnuolo cautioned that the research is still in the early phase, and people shouldn’t start to eat loads of avocado for the potential cancer-fighting benefits. The compound he isolated is very pure and still needs much study.
Spagnuolo’s lab partnered with the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, a not-for-profit, public-private consortium, and the research gets funding from the university and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada.
Source: The Record