High dietary fructose has been known to promote tumour growth, yet the mechanisms for this are incompletely understood. Fowle-Grider et al. now show that dietary fructose supports interorgan lipid transfer to enhance tumour growth.

Next, the authors demonstrated that cancer cells themselves do not metabolize fructose, as they lack expression of ketohexokinase-C (KHK-C), which can efficiently metabolize fructose. Instead, in analogy to most tissues, tumours express KHK-A, which has a high km for fructose. Pharmacological inhibition of KHK isoforms did not diminish fructose-induced proliferation in cancer cell lines.