How a Common Sugar May Be Helping Ovarian Cancer Escape and Spread

The Hidden Messenger Inside Your Kitchen Cabinet

A new study from The Wistar Institute has uncovered an unexpected link between fructose — a common dietary sugar — and the spread of an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. The discovery reframes how scientists think about cancer recurrence, and it starts with something most people consume every single day.

Chemotherapy is designed to kill cancer cells, but some of them survive treatment by entering a state known as cellular senescence. Far from lying dormant, these cells remain metabolically active, releasing a mixture of proteins, fats, and other molecules that can reshape the tumor and its environment by signaling to nearby cells. New research published in *Nature Aging* has discovered that one of those signals may be fructose — and it may be instructing cancer cells to spread. "Our study is among the first to show that a nutrient — in this case, fructose — can act as one of those signals," says Aidan Cole, a molecular biologist at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.

How Fructose Loosens Cancer's Grip

The study was led by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Aidan Cole and senior author Dr. Katherine Aird, and focused on high-grade serous ovarian cancer, the most common and aggressive form of the disease. To determine what the cellular process was, the researchers first induced senescence in lab-grown ovarian cancer cells with cisplatin, then collected the growth media, which contained all the molecules the cells had released over two days. What they saw was that it did make untreated cancer cells much more likely to loosen their grip on neighboring cells and detach from three-dimensional tumor-like spheroids — the first critical step in ovarian cancer's characteristic mode of spread.

Fructose didn't act only as a fuel — it altered mitochondrial metabolism, which ultimately reduced cholesterol production. That loss of cholesterol had an important consequence, because cholesterol helps stabilize cell membranes and anchors cells to one another and to surrounding tissue. With less cholesterol in the membranes, cancer cells became less adhesive and more likely to break free. Fructose — a sugar found in fruit, honey, and processed foods — turned out to be central to those signals, and a high-fructose diet increased cancer spread in mice.

A Troubling Wrinkle: Statins

That discovery led the team to examine statins, a widely prescribed class of drugs that reduces cholesterol production. About 39 million people in the United States take these medications. In the study's experimental models, statins alone weakened the adhesion between cancer cells and promoted their escape. This finding introduces a complicated question about a medication millions rely on for heart health.

As Dr. Katherine Aird put it: "We haven't tested this effect in patients yet, but it raises questions about combining cholesterol-lowering drugs with chemotherapy, especially since ovarian cancer is most common in postmenopausal women who are often already on statins." While the findings raise questions about whether statins could influence chemotherapy responses, the researchers stress that patients should not stop taking prescribed statins, as the results have not yet been confirmed in clinical studies.

What Comes Next

If researchers can understand what causes cancer cells to move around, it could provide a clue as to how they could prevent cancer recurrence — which is how 90 percent of the people who die from the disease are killed. A protein called NDUFA5, involved in how cells generate energy, was found to be required for the spread and could be a target for future drugs.

Although the research focused on ovarian cancer, the scientists believe the same mechanism could potentially apply to other abdominal cancers, including pancreatic, liver, and colorectal cancers. Aird was careful to note, "We can't call it universal yet," but she and Cole have already begun planning follow-up studies to determine whether the results can be reproduced in several other types of cancer. For now, the research offers a striking new window into why cancer so often finds a way to come back — and points to a surprisingly common sugar as a potential culprit hiding in plain sight.