Like any cells in the body, cancer cells need sugar – namely glucose – to fuel cell proliferation and growth.
Like any cells in the body, cancer cells need sugar – namely glucose – to fuel cell proliferation and growth. Cancer cells in particular metabolize glucose at a much higher rate than normal cells. However researchers from USC Viterbi’s Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science have unlocked a weakness in a common type of cancer cell: sugar inflexibility. That is, when cancer cells are exposed to a different type of sugar – galactose – the cells can’t adapt, and will die.
The discovery, which could have important implications for new metabolic treatments for cancer, was led by Dongqing Zheng, a PhD student in the lab of Nicholas Graham, assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science. The research was recently published in the Journal of Cell Science.
The paper describes how oncogenes, the genes that cause cancer, can also lead cancer cells to become inflexible to changes in their sugar supply. Normally, cells grow by metabolizing glucose, but most normal cells can also grow using galactose. However, the team discovered that cells possessing a common cancer-causing gene named AKT cannot process galactose, and therefore they die when exposed to this type of sugar.
Read more at University Of Southern California
Image by jan mesaros from Pixabay
