Health: See how Dietary Fatty Acids called Dihomogamma-Linolenic Acid (DGLA) can be used kill/cure cancer cells – Treatment on Cancer

An Oncology researchers at Stanford University and Washington State University have shown that dihomogamma-linolenic acid, or DGLA, can be used to target and kill human cancer cells.

Dihomogamma-linolenic Acid is derived from Gamma-linolenic (GLA) acid. GLA is essential for the maintenance of brain function, skeletal health, reproductive health and metabolism. It is also essential to stimulate the growth of skin and hair.

Many people use gamma linolenic acid (GLA) for conditions such as arthritis, nerve damage due to diabetes, eczema, high blood pressure, and other conditions, but there is no good scientific evidence to support most of these uses.

GLA is derived from vegetable oils such as evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) oil (EPO), blackcurrant seed oil, borage seed oil and hemp seed oil. GLA is also found in various amounts in edible hemp seeds, oats , barley and spirulina.

Concerns have been raised about higher consumption of linoleic acid being harmful to heart health due to potential pro-inflammatory and thrombogenic properties.

Linoleic acid may be elongated to arachidonic acid and subsequently synthesized to a variety of pro-inflammatory eicosanoids, which may increase various medical conditions.

Typically, Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent type of cell death that has been discovered in recent years and has become a focal point for disease research as it is closely linked to many disease processes.

Also Read: Healthy heart: Check out these five (5) symptoms that indicate you have an unhealthy heart – Health Tips

Dr. Jennifer Watts, Washington State University Associate Professor and corresponding research author, said this discovery has many implications, including a step towards potential cancer treatment.

Dr Watts said to Get View Updates, "If you could deliver DGLA precisely to a cancer cell, it could promote Ferroptosis and lead to tumor cell death.

Also, knowing that this fat promotes ferroptosis may also affect how we think about conditions such as kidney disease and neurodegeneration where we want to prevent this type of cell death.

Dihomogamma-linolenic acid or DGLA is a polyunsaturated fatty acid found in small amounts in the human body, though rarely in the human diet. Compared to other fatty acids, such as those found in fish oil, DGLA is relatively understudied.

For almost twenty years, Dr Watts has been researching dietary fats, including DGLA, using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as an animal model. C. A microscopic worm. Elegans is often used in molecular research because it is transparent and allows scientists to easily study cell-level activity in an entire animal over a relatively short lifetime. The results were found in the C. Elegan cells are also often transferred to human cells.

Researchers found that feeding nematodes to the diet of DGLA-charged bacteria killed all the germ cells in the worms as well as the stem cells that make up the germ cells. There were many signs of ferroptosis in the way the cells died.

Dr Marcos Perez, a Washington State University doctoral student and first author of the paper, said, Many of the mechanisms we saw in nematodes were consistent with the characteristics of ferroptosis in mammalian systems, including the presence of redox-active iron and the inability to repair oxidized lipids, which are like molecular executioners.

Also Read: Causes, prevention and remedies of Skin hyperpigmentation among pregnant women

Dr. Watts and Dr. Perez collaborated with Dr. Scott Dixon of Stanford University, who has been studying ferroptosis and its potential for cancer control for many years to see if the results would be translated into human cells.

Using what they learned from nematode work , the researchers have shown that DGLA can induce ferroptosis in human cancer cells. They also found an interaction with another class of fatty acids called ether lipid, which had a protective effect against DGLA. When the ether lipids were removed, the cells died faster in the presence of DGLA.

Significantly, in addition to this new knowledge, the research has also shown that C. Elegans can be a useful animal research model in the study of ferroptosis, a field that has had to rely mostly on cell culture.

For more on Health Treatments, keep on logging to Get View Updates.