Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!
"... Researchers ... have discovered that pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a particularly aggressive kind of cancer, uses a unique metabolic pathway, one that normal-growing adult cells rarely use in order to obtain and generate nutrients. This pathway, which requires an enzyme called ornithine aminotransferase or OAT, could present an opportunity to develop new treatments that target PDA specifically, with few side effects.
To support their growth, pancreatic tumors must make large amounts of compounds called polyamines. Most cells use processes that rely on arginine to make the polyamines they need. The microenvironment of pancreatic tumors, however, typically lacks arginine ..."
From the abstract:
"There is a need to develop effective therapies for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), a highly lethal malignancy with increasing incidence and poor prognosis. Although targeting tumour metabolism has been the focus of intense investigation for more than a decade, tumour metabolic plasticity and high risk of toxicity have limited this anticancer strategy. Here we use genetic and pharmacological approaches in human and mouse in vitro and in vivo models to show that PDA has a distinct dependence on de novo ornithine synthesis from glutamine. We find that this process, which is mediated through ornithine aminotransferase (OAT), supports polyamine synthesis and is required for tumour growth. This directional OAT activity is usually largely restricted to infancy and contrasts with the reliance of most adult normal tissues and other cancer types on arginine-derived ornithine for polyamine synthesis. This dependency associates with arginine depletion in the PDA tumour microenvironment and is driven by mutant KRAS. Activated KRAS induces the expression of OAT and polyamine synthesis enzymes, leading to alterations in the transcriptome and open chromatin landscape in PDA tumour cells. The distinct dependence of PDA, but not normal tissue, on OAT-mediated de novo ornithine synthesis provides an attractive therapeutic window for treating patients with pancreatic cancer with minimal toxicity."
Targeting a unique metabolic pathway might starve pancreatic cancer Researchers discover that pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma depends on a unique metabolic pathway to make compounds necessary for its growth
Ornithine aminotransferase supports polyamine synthesis in pancreatic cancer (no public access)
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