New research shows 2p pill could stop cancer as well as dementia

The researchers found that mice given a diet rich in vitamin D had better immune resistance to experimentally transplanted cancers, and improved responses to immunotherapy treatment. Caetano Reis e Sousa, head of the Immunobiology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, and senior author, said: “What we’ve shown here came as a surprise – vitamin D can regulate the gut microbiome to favour a type of bacteria which gives mice better immunity to cancer.

“This could one day be important for cancer treatment in humans, but we don’t know how and why vitamin D has this effect via the microbiome. More work is needed before we can conclusively say that correcting a vitamin D deficiency has benefits for cancer prevention or treatment.”

Vitamin D pills can be bought very cheaply – with 400 pills available for less than £8 online meaning they’re less than 2p a day – and the researchers said it was a good source of it. Vitamin D has also been said to stave off the potential of getting dementia – and supplements are also recommended by the NHS . Research conducted in France found that individuals exhibiting vitamin D levels below 50 nmol/L were nearly three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers were surprised to find that vitamin D acts on specific cells in the intestine, which in turn increase the amount of a bacteria called Bacteroides fragilis. According to the findings, the tumours did not grow as much, suggesting that the microbe gave mice better immunity to cancer.

In order to test if the bacteria alone could give better cancer immunity, mice on a normal diet were given the bacteria. These mice were also better able to resist tumour growth but not when the mice were placed on a vitamin D-deficient diet.

Although there has been no conclusive evidence, previous studies have proposed a link between vitamin D deficiency and cancer risk in humans. To investigate this, the researchers looked at a dataset from 1.5 million people in Denmark, which highlighted a link between lower vitamin D levels and a higher risk of cancer.

A separate analysis of a group of people with cancer also suggested that people with higher vitamin D levels were more likely to respond well to immune-based cancer treatments. Bacteroides fragilis is also found in the microbiome of humans, but more research is needed to establish whether vitamin D helps provide some immune resistance to cancer through the same mechanism.