El-Kenawi et al., 2021, Macrophages feed cancer cells!

Do you remember my highlight from El-Kenawi, et al., 2019? During this project, I observed cholesterol accumulation in prostate cancer-associated macrophages, with acidity dramatically increasing intracellular lipids.

Why is this important?

Cholesterol is used to make the 5 main classes of steroid hormones.

Cancers like prostate, breast and ovarian cancers use steroidal hormones to proliferate. While therapies blocking these hormones are effective, resistance often develops when tumors increase cholesterol utilization for local steroid production.

Key Research Questions:

• Does macrophage activity regulate response to steroid hormone receptor therapies (e.g., androgen receptor antagonists)?
• Does cholesterol exchange play a role in therapeutic resistance?

In El-Kenawi et al., 2021, we employed:

to investigate macrophage cholesterol’s role in hormonal therapy response, validating findings with ex vivo patient-derived prostate cancer tissues.