BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Tomorrow morning, families all over will work to prepare a Thanksgiving meal to remember, but Faeth Therapeutics hopes to find a recipe just right for taking down cancer.

CEO of the company, Anand Parikh tells CBS42 their company was built to be the first of its kind in history, developing what they call the fourth pillar of cancer care- nutrition. This follows surgery, radio therapy, ad traditional drugs.

They’re now in the beginning stages of working with UAB trial patients to develop diet interventions that will starve their tumors of the nutrients they need to grow.

Faeth Therapeutics calls this way of targeting cancer precision nutrition, saying traditional treatment like chemotherapy can be 500% more effective when paired with the right diet. 

Parikh says this method could help people live longer or even cure cancer in certain cases.

“If you’re taking drugs like chemotherapy, which is a drug obviously, how can we pair with chemotherapy to maximize the outcome of that chemotherapy,” Parikh said. “After all, if you’re going to go through all the pain of getting your cancer treated and all the struggle, we all want to maximize the outcome, right? We don’t want to go through that for nothing.”

According to co-founder Professor Oliver Maddocks, these diets are customized for each patient to complement their current treatment, which allows them to acquire a sense of control during the process.

“People just like this ability to control their diet and do something with it, and not just have it as some background passive thing that they don’t really know, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ It gives them, you know, much more direction in that element of their treatment,” Maddocks said.

It’s a direction that Parikh says could be world changing, leaving families more intact.

“You know particularly around the holidays as I mentioned, when we think about time with our family, we want to keep more families together,” Parikh said. “That’s what we think about every day- is helping these patients live longer so they can celebrate one or two or 10 more Thanksgivings.”

Parikh says the treatment is only available to patients on trial at this time, but they hope to bring this to all patients with every type of cancer someday.

To learn if you might be qualified for a trial, you can visit https://www.faeththerapeutics.com/