Congratulations to the Endocrinology section's Rachel Perry, who received the Yale Cancer Center Translational Science Research Prize, for a paper published in Cell Reports this summer that showed that both mitochondrial uncoupling with a controlled-release mitochondrial protonophore (CRMP) her team developed several years ago (Perry et al. Science 2015), and glucose-lowering with metformin, slowed obesity-associated tumor growth in two mouse models of colon cancer in an insulin-dependent manner.
These results indicate that insulin-lowering interventions – whether they be diet and exercise, metformin, or even novel insulin sensitizing therapies such as CRMP – could slow colon tumor growth by lowering tumor glucose uptake and oxidation, measured using novel in vivo methods.