Cancer sometimes becomes resistant to chemotherapy, but we did a study that shows a certain type of lung cancer is highly dependent on a certain amino acid and when you fast intermittently it deprives the cancer of that amino acid and causes the cancer cells to die.
they show if you starve cells in a dish in a way that might mimic what happens when you fast, you can kill the cells. I didn't see any mention of even mouse studies in there, so I don't know what their in vivo model was but it mostly looks like cell culture to me (apologies if I've missed that). Extrapolating that to humans is extremely hard.
For sure a promising result but its pretty preliminary.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29875130
Apparently efforts similar to these go back to at least six years. "Metabolic reprogramming: A new paradigm for targeting cisplatin resistant cells" describes a recurring research program that began in 2012 which seeks to impede cancer via restraining oxidative metabolism, though I think their method of blocking cancer cell metabolism may be more selective than starving ALL of the patient's cells.
Thank you =)