An unhealthy diet: making sense of a fatty niche for leukemia stem cells

In an era of obesity epidemics and surging cardiovascular mortality, new evidence has linked our unhealthy diets with an unexpected danger—cancer cell survival and resistance to chemotherapy. Leukemia stem cells (LSCs) are the prototypical cancer stem cell, defined by their ability to initiate and maintain leukemia and also to differentiate into mature progeny that lack this self-renewal ability (1). Analogous to hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), their counterparts in normal development, it has been postulated that LSCs also coopt or hijack cell extrinsic support from secreted or cellular factors to support their own survival within the bone marrow and other hematopoietic niches (2,3).