For years, scientists have puzzled over the paradoxical relationship between cancer and retinoids, the metabolites that animals and people produce when their bodies break down vitamin A. About 40 years ago, a leukemia patient was cured with a combination of arsenic and a retinoid known as all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA). Popular science immediately seized on the idea that vitamin A-rich foods like carrots could help cure or prevent cancer.
But while some experiments in petri dishes seemed promising, nearly all efforts to treat cancer patients with vitamin A or retinoids caused tumors to grow, not shrink. Eventually, the FDA started to heavily scrutinize vitamin A-related drug tests in cancer patients, and no such treatment was approved except for patients with one specific kind of cancer: acute promyelocitic leukemia (APL). Now, a team of cancer biologists led by Yibin Kang, the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, have resolved this paradox, and in the process found a potential new avenue for thwarting many cancers, including pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer.
They detailed their work in two recent papers: one in iScience published in November 2025 and a new paper published today in Nature Immunology. Kang, a founding member of the Princeton Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, is also an associate director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. To read the full story.