The antioxidant addiction of cancer.

Tumours maintain elevated ROS by boosting antioxidant capacity, but stage-specific antioxidant dependencies create vulnerabilities that can be targeted to treat established cancers and limit metastasis and therapy resistance.

• Why it matters: Broad dietary antioxidant supplementation has shown limited clinical benefit and sometimes harm, while antioxidant defenses appear selectively required at different stages, raising the need for stage- and pathway-specific targeting.
• What they did: This Perspective synthesizes evidence that oncogenic signalling, tumour suppressor loss, metabolic reprogramming, and nutrient stress elevate ROS, and that lipid peroxide–driven ferroptosis can be triggered when antioxidant control fails.
• The result: It argues that exploiting tumour stage-specific antioxidant pathway dependencies may enable selective therapies that spare normal tissues, offering routes to reduce metastasis and overcome therapy resistance.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.