El-Kenawi et al., 2021, Macrophages feed cancer cells!
Do you remember my highlight for El-Kenawi, et al., 2019? During working on this project, I observed accumulation of cholesterol in prostate cancer associated-macrophage. We also observed that acidity skyrocketed intracellular lipid in macrophages.
And why is this important?
Cholesterol is used to make the 5 main classes of steroid hormones.
Cancers such as prostate, breast and ovarian cancers use steroidal hormones to proliferate. Therapies that stop these hormones from working are effective but resistance eventually occur. One path to resistance results from tumors utilizing an increasing amount of cholesterol to make local steroids.
Thus, I asked a couple of simple questions:
Does macrophage regulate response to therapies targeting the steroid hormone receptors such as androgen receptor (AR) antagonists?
Does cholesterol exchange play a role?
In this study, El-Kenawi et al., 2021 utilized immune assays, mouse models, RNA sequencing and metabolomics to investigate how macrophage cholesterol regulates response to hormonal therapies and androgen receptor blockade. We also validated our findings using ex vivo prostate cancer tissues isolated from patients.
