Forget everything (or almost) what you thought you knew about vitamin D, which is actually a hormone and not a vitamin. The difference? A hormone is a substance produced by the body. A vitamin is a substance essential to the body, but not produced by it. It is provided in small quantities, notably through food.
At the IGBMC (Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology), one of the most important research institutes in eastern France, based in Illkirch, researcher Gilles Laverny and the team of around ten people he coordinates have been interested for around fifteen years in this hormone – which plays a key role for our well-being since it is essential for maintaining calcium and phosphate levels in the body –, as well as than cancer of the prostate directly linked to hormonal dysregulation. “We are trying to understand how this cancer develops, how the tumor progresses, what type of treatment can be used, how these treatments work and why certain prostate cancers are chemoresistant and no longer respond to treatments,” explains the researcher.
8,700 deaths per year in the Grand Est
In the Grand Est, 51,000 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. It is the most common cancer in men. In the region, the incidence rate (the number of new cases of the disease observed over a given period, Editor’s note) is 4% higher than the national average. Still in the region, it is the cause of 8,700 deaths per year, directly linked to “therapeutic escapes”, i.e. cancers for which currently available treatments are no longer effective.
Overcoming certain resistance to chemotherapy
Studies carried out in the laboratory over five years, as part of a thesis work (by Kateryna Len, whose last year of thesis was funded by the Arc Foundation), highlighted the potential of vitamin D to lift certain resistance to chemotherapy. Gilles Laverny, who supervised the studies, explains: “We showed, using patient cells that if we combined chemotherapy with a supply of vitamin D or analogs (a molecule resembling it, Editor’s note), we were able to to resensitize the tumor to chemotherapy, and it regressed again. »
-This research work, which was the subject of a scientific publication, paves the way for the realization of a clinical trial carried out on human beings to “compare the prognosis of patients with resistant cancer treated conventionally alone or in combination with vitamin D administered at non-deleterious doses for the regulation of calcium and phosphate in the body.
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