Researchers have discovered how to kill cells that cause breast cancer by leaving them without essential nutrients for their survival. The discovery was published at the end of August in the scientific journal Nature Metabolism and, according to the study, resulted in the shrinkage of tumors in mice and in tissues derived from human patients.
Cancer cells feed on nutrients that are essential for their survival and growth, such as glutamine, an amino acid found in foods such as meat, fish, eggs, legumes and some vegetables.
Previous studies have shown that depriving these cells of glutamine or preventing its conversion into metabolites can stop the cells from growing in the lab. However, more recent clinical trials, conducted in breast cancer patients who were given a drug that stopped the cancer cells from getting glutamine, found that the cells were able to adapt and find a new way to live without the amino acid.
Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York City, USA, have observed that cancer cells adapt to glutamine deprivation by activating a pathway that generates a metabolite called alpha-ketoglutarate, a derivative of glutamine. This allows them to continue producing energy and increasing in size.
“That got us thinking, could we exploit this for cancer therapy?” CSHL assistant professor Michael Lukey recalls in a press release. “Could we target glutamine metabolism? We know that cells adapt to it. So could we simultaneously target their adaptive response by inhibiting the pathway?”
So that’s what the researchers did. Instead of focusing on cutting off the supply of glutamine to cells, they focused on inhibiting the metabolic pathways that help them adapt to the lack of the amino acid. According to the studythe approach was successful, killing breast cancer cells in laboratory dishes, which contained tissue derived from human patients, and in mice.
According to the researchers, the tumors stopped growing and even shrank after the new approach. The animals remained healthy.
Now, inhibitors of both metabolic pathways—both glutamine and the cell’s adaptation process—are being investigated in additional studies. Lukey notes that these pathways may be especially important for breast cancer metastasis to different tissues, including some that are very difficult to treat.
“Brain metastases in particular have no effective therapy,” Lukey explains. The researcher hopes that the combination therapy developed in his lab could ultimately improve the effectiveness of glutamine metabolism inhibitors in the clinic. This could mean effective new treatments that target cancer’s metabolic defects.
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This content was originally published in Study reveals strategy to kill breast cancer cells on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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