By Anne Levin

Princeton University is the home of a new branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, it was announced Tuesday, April 13. The sole focus will be on cancer metabolism and its promise for new and better ways to prevent and treat the disease, according to statements from the two institutions.

Princeton joins the Ludwig Institute’s locations at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of Lausanne.

“The new branch offers us the chance to capitalize on multiple areas where Princeton is a world leader and has world-leading technologies that haven’t yet been applied to cancer,” said Joshua Rabinowitz, a professor of chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton. Rabinowitz, who specializes in cancer and metabolism, is the director of the branch. “We want to continue to push the frontiers of those technologies, because ultimately technologies drive biological understanding, which opens up new avenues for cancer treatment and prevention,” he said.

The clinical aspect of the program will be conducted in the tri-state area, including in partnership with RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the state’s only U.S. National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center and a consortium cancer center between Rutgers and Princeton universities and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Among the questions to be addressed are: Since tumors feast on glucose, should cancer patients eat more sugary treats or fewer? When advanced cancer patients see their bodies wasting away, should they fight back with carb-loading or steak? How does cancer hijack a patient’s metabolism to grow and metastasize?

The branch will focus on dietary strategies to prevent and treat cancer; how bodies inadvertently support tumor growth and metastasis; and the interplay between a patient’s metabolism, gut microbiome, and anti-cancer immune response.

“Diet is an overlooked therapeutic strategy that can either help turn on an immune response or work with classical drugs to make them work better at treating cancer,” said Rabinowitz.

The researchers plan to run diet trials that are both scientifically rigorous and immediately beneficial to patients. “Pharmaceutical companies won’t typically pay for those,” Rabinowitz said. “Hopefully we’ll be engaged in multiple trials of this sort, both locally and taking advantage of the best-in-world clinical investigators, wherever they may be.”

Eileen White, a professor of moleculary biology and biochemistry at Rutgers, associate director of the branch, is a longtime collaborator with Princeton career scientists. Yibin Kang, Princeton’s Warner-Lambert/Parke-David Professor of Molecular Biology, is a principal investigator and founding member of the branch.

Chi Van Dang, scientific director of the Ludwig Institute, said, “A more sophisticated understanding of cancer metabolism holds considerable promise for the optimization of cancer prevention and therapy, yet few organizations have assembled a critical mass of experts dedicated exclusively to this promising frontier of research. The Ludwig Princeton Branch will fill that gap by bringing together leading experts in cancer biology and metabolism, focusing their efforts on the most important questions of the field and supporting the translation of their discoveries for the benefit of cancer patients, which remains Ludwig’s top priority.”

Rabinowitz hopes to have targeted nutritional advice for cancer patients within the next decade.

“People know they need to try to stay nourished, but they really get no detailed guidance,” he said. “For example, a lot of patients are told to take fish oils, because fish oils are viewed as good fat. But there’s also both experimental and clinical evidence that polyunsaturated fats like fish oils accelerate the growth of certain tumors. So here you have dieticians giving very generic health advice to a set of patients who have a really specific health problem, and they probably need quite different advice. Perhaps they need to be told, ‘Skip the salmon, go have some butter and steak.’ I’m not saying we’re there yet, but that’s where I want us to get.”

The branch will open new educational and research opportunities for postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates at Princeton.

“Cancer is a disease that touches so many of us,” Rabinowitz said. “From Princeton undergraduates to the grad students and faculty, I think we all appreciate the importance of this problem, and we’re all motivated to bring our expertise to bear on it. At the same time, until now Princeton has not really had a dedicated or coherent effort in the cancer area.”

He continued: “We have students and faculty who bring incredible technologies and a depth of fundamental science knowledge that’s relevant to cancer, but hasn’t always been applied effectively to cancer yet. One thing that I really want to do is catalyze the application of the technologies where Princeton is the world leader to cancer.”