When it comes to pancreatic cancer, finding effective treatments has always been a notoriously tough nut to crack for the medical community.
But now, scientists at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Perlmutter Cancer Center have stumbled upon a promising approach that could potentially stall pancreatic cancer growth. Here’s a simple breakdown of what the scientists did and why it’s sparking excitement.
Understanding the Enemy: How Pancreatic Cancer Fuels Itself
Imagine a plant. To grow, it needs sunlight, water, and nutrients from the soil. Similarly, for cancer cells to grow, they need specific substances, mainly coming from our blood.
But pancreatic cancer has a tricky way of feeding itself even when it’s hard to access these substances.
In simpler terms, the more a pancreatic tumor grows, the harder it becomes for vital resources like oxygen and blood sugar to reach every cancer cell.
Pancreatic cancer cells, however, dodge this problem by finding alternative sources of fuel to sustain their rapid growth, which is one of the reasons why they’re so deadly.
An Innovative Approach: Trick and Starve the Cancer
In the recently published study in Nature Cancer, researchers focused on a drug meant to fool and starve pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells, a common type of pancreatic cancer cell.
To explain further, these cells, when starved of their usual fuel, utilize an enzyme (a kind of protein that speeds up biochemical reactions) to change a substance called glutamate into glutamine, which they can use as a backup fuel.
However, previous drugs that aimed to stop this enzyme and thereby halt the production of backup fuel didn’t work out too well.
That’s because cancer cells, being the survivalists they are, simply found another workaround to find the fuel they need.
That’s where DRP-104, an experimental drug, comes into the picture. It acts like a decoy, resembling glutamine but is unusable as fuel by the cancer cells.
So, the cancer cells, tricked and unable to get the real fuel, slow down in growth.
The Two-Pronged Attack: Combining Treatments for Greater Effect
But the researchers didn’t stop there. When cancer cells were duped by DRP-104, they tried another method to get the fuel, involving a protein called ERK.
By also employing an existing drug, trametinib, which blocks this ERK protein, the team essentially cornered the cancer cells, significantly reducing their ability to find alternative fuels and thereby slowing their growth even more in mouse models.
The Road Ahead: Cautious Optimism and Further Investigations
The optimism in the scientific community is palpable but tempered with caution.
Alec Kimmelman, M.D., Ph.D., a lead author of the study, notes that while there have been significant advancements in understanding how cancer cells adapt to find fuel, translating this knowledge into effective treatments has been a tough journey.
Nonetheless, the current study gives a glimmer of hope that fooling and starving cancer cells might be a viable way to tackle the deadly disease.
The next steps involve carefully understanding how these treatments might impact the overall health and other cellular functions in our bodies.
Kimmelman and his team are set to delve deeper, exploring how starving the cancer cells of glutamine affects other backup plans the cells might have.
The ultimate goal is a balancing act: find a way to stymie cancer cell growth effectively without causing too much collateral damage to normal, healthy cells.
In a nutshell, while the journey toward an effective pancreatic cancer treatment still has miles to go, studies like these light the path, offering hope and direction for future research.
And though the study is in its early stages and far from being a ready-to-use treatment, it’s a step closer to understanding how we might one day outsmart pancreatic cancer.
If you care about cancer, please read studies about common drugs for inflammation may help kill cancer, and statin drugs can starve cancer cells to death.
For more information about cancer, please see recent studies about these two things are key to surviving cancer and results showing common Indian fruit may slow down cancer growth.
The research findings can be found in Nature Cancer.
Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
