Widely used vitamin supplement may encourage breast cancer growth and spread

A supplement often marketed for cellular energy and healthy aging may also give certain cancer cells the fuel they need to grow. In animal studies, scientists found that nicotinamide riboside, a form of vitamin B3, boosted breast cancer development and helped the disease spread to the brain.

The results highlight the danger of assuming that something helpful for healthy cells will have the same effect in every tissue. Cancer cells also rely on energy, but they can use nutrients very differently from the surrounding tissue.

An international research team led by Elena Goun at the University of Missouri examined those differences with a new imaging tool. The work, published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics, was not a clinical trial and did not measure cancer risk in people who take supplements.

Nicotinamide riboside, often called NR, is used by the body to produce NAD+, a molecule involved in energy production and many other cellular functions.

Interest in those roles has driven research into NR and age-related health. But increasing the supply of a nutrient does not necessarily produce the same outcome in healthy cells, immune cells and cancer cells.

The Missouri team created a probe that emits light when it detects NR uptake. Known as bioluminescent imaging, the method let researchers track how cells used the substance without repeatedly removing tissue for measurement.

The stronger the signal, the greater the uptake shown by the probe. That gave the scientists a way to compare different cells and identify cancers with a strong appetite for NR instead of treating all tumors as biologically the same.

Triple-negative breast cancer was one of the cancers that stood out. These tumors lack three common markers that help guide some breast cancer treatments, which makes them especially difficult to treat.

In the animal models, NR supplementation was associated with more cancer growth and spread to the brain. The findings suggest that the same energy-related pathway attracting attention in healthy aging could support harmful processes in this particular cancer setting.

The imaging approach was central to the advance. Learning which cells take up a compound could eventually help scientists spot cases where a supplement or treatment affects different tissues in different ways.

The study does not show that NR causes breast cancer in people, and it does not mean ordinary dietary vitamin B3 has the same effect. The experiments used specific cancer models and cannot be used to estimate a general risk for all supplement users.

What the research does show is the importance of studying supplements in the context of specific diseases. Tracking where a substance goes, and which cells benefit from it, may matter just as much as understanding what it does in healthy tissue.

Source: University of Missouri.

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