The Burrill Report

A team of academic and government researchers has identified compounds that delay the formation of tumors in mice and may provide new tools for studying the metabolism of cancer cells.

Cancer cells devote most of their energy to reproducing themselves, a process requiring them to trigger alternative metabolic pathways to produce new cellular building blocks. They’re supported in that effort by the enzyme pyruvate kinase. The new research suggests that molecular compounds that activate one form of the enzyme, PKM2, to correct the way human cancer cells metabolize glucose, and thus delay tumor development and decrease tumor size in mice.

The research, supported by the National Institutes of Health's new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), is detailed in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

"The last several years have brought an avalanche of new discoveries that have begun to explain a phenomenon of altered cancer cell metabolism first described almost 90 years ago," says Chris Austin, director of the NCATS Division of Pre-Clinical Innovation and one of the paper’s authors. "This work provides a wonderful example of how molecular compounds can be used as tools to probe and understand biological processes, and at the same time explore new drug targets in the fight against cancer."

The team also worked with scientists from the Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Toronto and Harvard Medical School.

New compound tools will be critical to dissecting the complex pathways that govern how cancer cells utilize nutrients such as glucose that provide the molecular building blocks to support rampant cell growth, notes the NIH. One such tool, used in this study, was the NIH’s Molecular Libraries and Imaging program, which offers biomedical researchers access to the large-scale screening capacity necessary to identify small molecules that can be optimized as chemical probes to study the functions of genes, cells, and biochemical pathways in health and disease.

MIT researcher Matthew Vander Heiden, senior author of the paper and a medical oncologist whose lab studies cancer metabolism, says he’s “cautiously optimistic that as we learn more about cancer cell metabolism, we may be able to identify drugs that act on PKM2 or other metabolic enzymes that could be tested against human cancers."




August 31, 2012
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-delaying_tumors.html