A team based at the University of Manchester, funded by Cancer Research UK, are designing a clinical trial involving tens of thousands of patients, which they hope to get underway within “three to five years”
Weight loss jabs could cut cancer risk by almost half and be given to people who are not obese, scientists say.
Landmark research appears to confirm the appetite-suppressing jabs which mimic a hormone that makes us feel full can also reduce risk from over a dozen obesity-related cancers. Experts suspect they are having an anti-cancer effect on top of the weight loss by also reducing inflammation in the body.
Half of us will get cancer in our lifetimes and researchers presenting the findings at the European Congress on Obesity in Malaga, Spain, say the jabs should now be considered to prevent this for people at risk. The weekly injections are currently prescribed for weight loss and Type 2 diabetes curb hunger pangs by mimicking the glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1 hormone which regulates feelings of fullness.
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Study author Dr Yael Wolff Sagy, of Clalit Health Services, Tel-Aviv, Israel, said: “This is potentially very exciting news for patients who are at high risk of obesity-related cancer, and possibly even other cancers. This indicates there is an additional mechanism with the jabs beyond simple weight loss. We believe this effect may come from the inflammation-reducing quality of GLP-1s. But of course, this type of study cannot say for sure that that’s the mechanism.
“I believe there could be a future where people who are not obese, but have other risk factors for cancer, could be prescribed GLP-1s to help prevent it.”
A team based at the University of Manchester, funded by Cancer Research UK, are designing a clinical trial involving tens of thousands of patients, which they hope to get underway within “three to five years”.
Unveiling the trial at Europe’s major obesity conference, a team of international experts issued a statement calling for weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro to be trialled for cancer prevention. The consensus statement was backed by 54 specialists from 12 countries, including 25 from the UK.
Lead author Dr Matthew Harris, of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre, said: “Rates of obesity have been rising quite substantially across the world for the past 30 years. We haven’t seen any country, particularly in the West, able to curb that rise.There’s going to be this massive increase in obesity related cancers. If we’re able to reverse obesity and prevent those cancers from happening, it could be a really significant public health intervention.
“Prevention is really important in cancer, especially now we have a weapon to potentially reduce one of the major risk factors, in obesity.These new drugs do provide genuinely fantastic weight loss, and may provide an intervention that could be delivered on a population-scale, where we have not been able to achieve this before.”
The Israeli researchers analysed electronic health record data on 6,356 adults treated for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Half received bariatric surgery such as gastric band surgery, and half received first generation weight loss jabs liraglutide, exenatide, or dulaglutide. Over a typical follow-up of 7.5 years, 298 patients were diagnosed with obesity-related cancer, and a similar rate in each group.
Once the additional weight loss from surgery was factored in the study found jabs were 41% better at preventing weight-related cancers. A previous systematic review found the surgery cut the chances of patients developing cancer by 38%. Combining the data it suggests that GLP-1s alone could cut cancer risk by almost half.
Professor Mark Lawler, an international cancer researcher expert from Queen’s University Belfast, who was not involved in the research, said: “These results are very exciting – we already know that bariatric surgery cuts obesity-related cancer risk by about a third; these data suggest that target GLP-1s may cut that risk by nearly 50% – an approach that would be transformational in preventing obesity-related cancer.
“Biologically, this makes sense, as targeting GLP-1 dampens down inflammation, one of the hallmarks of cancer. While further work is required on how it works, these data raise the intriguing possibility that a GLP-1 agonist jab could prevent multiple cancers in the general population. This work could herald a whole new era of preventative cancer medicine “
Study co-author Professor Dror Dicker cautioned that it was difficult to quantify the exact effect of GLP-1s on cancer prevention but they appeared to have a more powerful mechanism than bariatric surgery – which trials have shown cuts the risk of obesity-related cancers by between 30% and 42%.
Jason Halford, former president of the European Association for the Study of Obesity said the breakthrough could herald a “new dawn” in cancer prevention. He said: “I suspect oncologists will be interested in prescribing anti-obesity drugs. This has the potential to reduce the burden on oncology services in the NHS.”
Dr Yael Wolff Sagy added: “We do not yet fully understand how GLP-1s work, but this study adds to the growing evidence showing that weight loss alone cannot completely account for the metabolic, anti-cancer, and many other benefits that these medications provide.
“When we compared the risk reduction in patients who had a surgery versus those who used weight-loss medication, we saw it remained the same – even though the surgery patients lost a lot more weight. When we took into account the differences in weight reduction, we found the jabs were 41% more effective at preventing cancer.”
She added: “These drugs could be useful for a wide range of conditions. We would like to study other inflammation-related conditions, such as blood clots, to see if this effect is reproduced. The issue is that demand for these drugs is already through the roof.
“[Pharmaceutical companies] will need to figure out a way of making them cheaper, because right now the new generation medications are quite expensive, and in terms of public health health systems, I’m not sure they are considered cost-effective, despite all their amazing advantages.”