News & Media

The Yang Laboratory has been heavily engaged in studying the effect of dietary sugar in breast cancer development and progression in preclinical settings. Sugar consumption has surged up to 100 pounds per person per year, and an increase in the consumption of added sugars, particularly sugar-sweetened beverages, has been identified as a pivotal contributor to worldwide epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Their studies have suggested that refined sugar, especially sucrose, has the ability to stimulate the development of HER2 driven mouse mammary tumor, the human triple negative breast cancer MDA-231 xenograft tumor, and significantly increase lung metastasis of the mouse mammary gland 4T1 tumor model. Different from the “Warburg Effect”, the data generated in the Yang Laboratory suggested that the tumorigenic effect of sucrose was mediated by up-regulating 12-lipoxygenase (12-LOX) enzymes and its pro-inflammatory metabolite, 12-HETE, in all three breast cancer models tested. This certainly provided new insight as to how dietary sugar can potentially not only increase the risk of breast cancer, but also remarkably stimulate the development of metastasis. More importantly, they discovered for the first time that it is the fructose molecule within a sucrose enriched diet that leads to the significantly higher incidence of lung metastasis in the 4T1 mouse mammary gland tumor model. The importance of this study is highlighted by the fact the result of this study drew attention from over 240 news outlets around the world, including national news media NBC, Time, Today, Fox News, NPR etc. and 13 international media including UK (BBC), India, Argentina, Bangladesh etc. after their study on sugar promoting breast tumorigenesis was published in Cancer Research in January 2016.