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The School of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh released the excit­ing results of a recent study that could do won­ders for can­cer research.

Under the fund­ing of the Med­ical Research Coun­cil and the Well­come Trust, the university’s sci­en­tists were ana­lyz­ing the effect of oleic acid on miR‑7, an active cell mol­e­cule in the brain and a tumor sup­pres­sor that tar­gets crit­i­cal can­cer path­ways.
See more: Olive Oil Health Ben­e­fits
They dis­cov­ered that oleic acid, which is found in foods such as avo­ca­dos, nuts, sesame oil, and of course, olive oil, pre­vents a cell pro­tein known as MSI2 from stop­ping pro­duc­tion of miR‑7.

In stim­u­lat­ing the pro­duc­tion of miR, oleic acid helps pre­vent tumors from form­ing and may help break them down while they are still small. Researchers made their dis­cov­er­ies while test­ing on human cell extracts and on liv­ing HeLa cells in the lab, prov­ing the pro­teins in oleic acid to be ben­e­fi­cial to human cells.

Grac­jan Mich­lewski, a pro­fes­sor and researcher at the university’s school of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences and the leader of the study, said that the research sug­gests that oleic acid could help the pro­duc­tion of mol­e­cules sup­press­ing tumors and there­fore could help pre­vent and pos­si­bly fight can­cer.

“While we can­not yet say that olive oil in the diet helps pre­vent brain can­cer, our find­ings do sug­gest that oleic acid can sup­port the pro­duc­tion of tumor-sup­press­ing mol­e­cules in cells grown in the lab. Fur­ther stud­ies could help deter­mine the role that olive oil might have in brain health,” Mich­lewski said.

Mich­lewski worked along­side San­tosh Kumar and Angela Downie Ruiz Velasco on this study.

Given the low sur­vival rate of brain can­cer (the five-year sur­vival rate is only about 35 per­cent), their dis­cov­ery is no small feat. Fur­ther explo­ration of oleic acid’s impact on miR‑7 and other cell mol­e­cules will hope­fully reveal more about the poten­tial to fight can­cer with fatty acids such as those found in olive oil.

The com­plete study, pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy, can be found here.

• Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh School of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences


• National Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­ogy Infor­ma­tion