Dietary Supplements of Vitamin B3 to Improve the Efficacy of Immunotherapy Drugs

Release Date: 23-Nov-2020

Nutritional supplement such as nicotinamide riboside (NR) are believed to be increasing tumor infiltrating lymphocytes that have been exhausted against the microenvironment of the tumor. A novel study indicates that nicotinamide riboside is responsible for recharging tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes by acting on the mitochondrial fitness as well as stimulating mitophagy. When vitamin B3 was evaluated for improving mitochondrial fitness, they found that there was an association between T cell exhaustion and depolarized mitochondria.

It was observed that the whole mechanism was driven by the stressors in the microenvironment of the tumor. In addition to this, it also led to the terminal exhaustion which is although a state that reflects epigenetic reprogramming. PD-1 signalling, microenvironmental stressors and co-ordination of T cell receptor stimulation was found to be induced when given Vitamin B3. Some of the techniques that were performed for conducting the clinical research study were functional, transcriptomic, and epigenetic analyses.

The researchers have shown that TILs inability causes the accumulation of depolarized mitochondria. Although TILs have the ability to make new mitochondria but they don’t know how to remove the old damaged mitochondria. Epigenetic modifications were done to reprogramme the genome of the TILs by adding chemical group to the DNA. It was concluded by the researchers that some of the epigenetic reprograming made the TILs fix the mitochondrial dysfunction. Also, further studies reveal that vitamin B3 could improve mitophagy and mitochondrial fitness in different types of cells. Some of the cancer types that were found to be benefited from the dietary supplementation of vitamin B3 were skin cancer and colon cancer. Dietary supplement of Vitamin B3 was also found to be efficient in increasing the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors for the treatment of cancer.