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Colorectal cancer has become the leading cause of cancer-related death for people under 50. Its most common forms generally aren't treatable, either through conventional means like chemotherapy or newer immunotherapy drugs.

New research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), published in Nature Immunology, could someday give people living with colorectal cancer—and other currently untreatable diseases—a fighting chance. The findings suggest a transcription factor that usually promotes cancer growth can be turned into a cancer-fighting "force" inside the immune system.

In the battle against disease, doctors have long recognized fitness as one of the strongest determinants of patient outcomes. But for CSHL assistant professor Semir Beyaz, fitness means more than physique.

"We hypothesized that the fitness determinants of cancer and our immune cells may not be so different," he said. "They're in the same universe. They're constrained by the same chemical and physical rules. So, it's not surprising they'd end up evolving the same way."

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor delta (PPARD) helps orchestrate fat burning inside human cells. To investigate this transcription factor's role in health and disease, Beyaz's lab first focused on a mouse model of colorectal cancer. The team found that while cancer cells have their own PPARD, activating PPARD on the immune side turns a pro-cancer tumor environment into an anticancer arena.

"It's all about cell fitness," Beyaz explains. " What cells eat affects who they are.

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