Princeton University Will Partner With Cancer Research Institute

PRINCETON, NJ — The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research has partnered with Princeton University to study cancer metabolism and better ways to treat the disease moving forward, the university announced on Tuesday.

The Ludwig Princeton Branch will focus on how cancer impacts the metabolism of patients and how possible changes in diet and other factors could change how the disease grows and metastasizes within the body, the university said.

Joshua Rabinowitz, a professor of chemistry and a specialist in cancer in metabolism, will serve as the director of the branch. Ludwig Cancer Research’s other primary locations are Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MIT, Stanford University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Chicago, the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and the University of Oxford.

The Princeton site will be the first Ludwig location to focus on cancer and metabolism, which is an area that the center believes “holds considerable promise for the optimization of cancer prevention and therapy,” Chi Van Dang, the scientific director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, said in a university release.

The site’s director agrees.

“The new branch offers us the chance to capitalize on multiple areas where Princeton is a world leader and has world-leading technologies that haven’t yet been applied to cancer,” Rabinowitz said in the release. “We want to continue to push the frontiers of those technologies, because ultimately technologies drive biological understanding, which opens up new avenues for cancer treatment and prevention.”

The Princeton branch will focus on three main areas including dietary strategies to prevent and treat cancer, how bodies inadvertently support tumor growth and metastasis and the interplay between a patient’s metabolism, gut microbiome and anti-cancer immune response, the university said Tuesday.

Researchers plan to run diet trials that are both scientifically rigorous and immediately beneficial to patients and Rabinowitz said he hopes to target nutritional advice for cancer patients within the next 10 years.

Diet is an overlooked therapeutic strategy that can either help turn on an immune response or work with classical drugs to make them work better at treating cancer,” Rabinowitz said.