An unexpected twist in cancer metabolism
Most cells in the human body burn sugar to fuel their activities. When cells become cancerous, they employ an alternative, wasteful fuel-burning strategy — one that cancer biologists believe lets tumors devote resources to generating building blocks for new cancer cells. “A normal cell doesn’t need to grow, but a cancer cell has to duplicate itself,” says Matthew Vander Heiden, assistant professor of biology and member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.In a paper appearing in the Sept. 16 online edition of Science, Vander Heiden and researchers at Harvard University report a previously unknown element of cancer cells’ peculiar metabolism. They found that cells can trigger an alternative biochemical pathway that speeds up their metabolism and diverts the byproducts to construct new cells.The finding could help scientists design drugs that block cancer-cell metabolism, essentially starving them of the materials they need to grow and spread....