Does fructose contribute to the spread of ovarian cancer? What we know

• Ovarian cancer, doctors explain, can be hard to treat as it may go undiagnosed for a long time. That also makes the cancer more likely to spread through the body.
• Researchers from The Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to know what, exactly, makes it easier for ovarian cancer to spread, particularly in cases where it has already been subjected to chemotherapy.
• Through experiments in animal models they found that one particular nutrient — namely, fructose — can help boost the signalling of cancer cells, thus facilitating metastasis.

In 2026 alone, an estimated 21,010 people will have received a new diagnosis of ovarian cancer in the United States. This type of cancer has a 52% relative 5-year survival rate, which doctors and other medical experts are working hard to improve.

One of the most common types of treatment for ovarian cancer is chemotherapy but this does not result in the cancerous cells clearing up in every case, which can mean that the cancer may end up spreading further throughout the body, a phenomenon known as metastasis.

Recently, researchers from The Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, PA, set out to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms behind ovarian cancer metastasis.

“Chemotherapy remains one of the best treatment strategies for many cancers, including ovarian cancer. Unfortunately, some cancer cells can survive chemotherapy, and those cells release factors that influence cancer progression,” Katherine Aird, PhD, Professor and Co-Leader in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center, The Wistar Institute, told Medical News Today.

Aird is the senior author of a new preclinical study, which looked at how ovarian cancer cells that escape chemotherapy are able to spread throughout the body.

The study’s findings, which appear in Nature Aging, point the finger at a seemingly surprising culprit: fructose.