Foiling Cancer With its Own Sweet Tooth
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Christopher Vakoc and his lab have found that acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), an aggressive cancer that originates in the bone marrow, depends on a transporter to bring in the nutrient inositol, and the researchers believe they can find a way to cut off the cells’ food supply and kill them.
Cancers may streamline certain cell processes and rely on just one method to survive; for example, some remove backup pathways for DNA repair, “putting all their eggs in one basket” and depending only on a single pathway for survival. Prof Vakoc’s lab could then develop treatments to knock out that remaining pathway, killing the cancer cells.
In a study published in Cancer Discovery, Prof Vakoc and his lab reported that AML depends on inositol, an abundant sugar that is made in many human body tissues. It is also found in a wide variety of foods like fruits, beans, grains, and nuts, so cells can obtain it from outside the body, via the bloodstream.
Prof Vakoc discovered that the AML cells had streamlined and boosted their growth by disabling their own inositol production, instead relying on external inositol, bringing it in with a transporter on the cell surface. If a simple treatment could turn off or block this transporter, the cancer cells would starve. As Prof Vakoc explained, “An antibody approach would be very attractive. You could make an antibody that just sticks to this transporter. It doesn’t need to get into the cell, and it could shut off the transport function. The other possibility, from a drug development point of view, is inositol. You could build a molecular medicine that sort of looks like inositol, but maybe it has a few chemical differences that can clog the transport function.”
Not only could this method kill the cancer cells, but it would also leave normal cells unharmed since they can make their own inositol.
Source: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
