The "Achilles heel" of all types of cancer?
The life of a cancerous tumor may depend on a single enzyme
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaIt is believed that cancer is too complex a disease to be defeated by turning off one or two genes or proteins.
However, this is exactly what researchers from the University of California at Berkeley claim on the pages of PNAS (Benjamin et al., Ether lipid generating enzyme AGPS alters the balance of structural and signaling lipids to fuel cancer pathogenicity). In their opinion, it is enough to suppress the work of the only enzyme involved in lipid metabolism to stop the growth of the tumor and its metastasis.
Daniel Nomura and his collaborators turned to molecules that rarely come to the attention of cancer researchers – lipids. It is known that cancer cells treat them differently than normal ones: for example, the level of fatty acid esters in cancer cells increases greatly. But what is the reason for such metabolic features and why do malignant cells need them? This has remained a mystery for decades.
On the one hand, lipids are needed by cells to build the outer membrane and intracellular membrane organelles. Cancer cells divide quickly, so they need a lot of lipids. On the other hand, lipids can participate in the transmission of signals that push the cell to constant growth and division. Mr. Nomura and his colleagues paid special attention to this second function of lipids. They were able to show that the shutdown of the enzyme alkylglycerol phosphate synthetase (AGPS) turns out to be critical for cancer cells: they became inactive and lost the ability to capture new "living spaces".
At the same time, scientists noticed that cancer cells are characterized by increased synthesis of AGPS. Moreover, if mice with AGPS turned off were injected with cancer cells, then the tumor in such animals, contrary to usual, did not develop.
Suppression of AGPS led to a decrease in the level of esterified fatty acids in cancer cells, as well as other types of lipids, such as prostaglandins and some phospholipids, on which the ability of cancer cells to survive and migrate to new places depended. Obviously, the shutdown of the enzyme hit the signaling pathways that used lipids as intermediaries.
The effect of disabling the AGPS enzyme turned out to be so outstanding that researchers, albeit with some caution, believe that they have managed to find the "Achilles heel" of cancer.
However, they have yet to check whether this enzyme is needed for all types of cancer, and not only for skin and breast tumors, on which experiments were conducted, and also whether this method of suppressing cancer in the human body will work.
Prepared based on the materials of the University of California at Berkeley:
Disabling enzyme reduces tumor growth, cripples cancer cells, study finds.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.08.2013