1/5/2024 0 Comments Science daily geneticsLyssiotis and his team have been working on this research for nearly a decade alongside their collaborators in the Sadanandam lab at the Institute for Cancer Research in London. Lyssiotis' team recognize this unknown regulatory process, as well as a cancer-promoting mutation in the KRAS gene, which is common in pancreatic cancer, as two ways that cancer cells control their usage of uridine. "The cancer cells seem to be sensing the concentrations of glucose and uridine in the local environment to inform their adaptation," says Matt Ward, another co-first author. "Likely, it's coming from multiple places, and so far we haven't been able to pin it to a single source."Įvents that Lyssiotis refers to as "times of crisis" - when cells don't have enough nutrients, because of limited blood access and/or intense competition between cells - could be a clue as to why, and where, cells turn to uridine. "Part of the picture is it's in the bloodstream, but we don't know where it's coming from specifically," said Lyssiotis. Uridine is present in the tumor microenvironment, but its exact source, and how cancer cells access it, remains a mystery. Blocking such compensatory switches could lead us to new treatments and that's the door we hope this study will open." "These findings show that, under certain circumstances, uridine is one of those fuels."Īsked about impact, Zeribe Nwosu, Ph.D., one of the co-first authors in the study, says "the ability of cancer to switch to alternative nutrients has fascinated me for a long time. "We know they still grow, obviously, but what are they using to grow?" he said. Costas Lyssiotis, Ph.D., Maisel Research Professor of Oncology and lead investigator of the study, explained that without the right nutrients, the cancer cells get hungry. Pancreatic tumors have few functioning blood vessels and can't easily access nutrients that come from the bloodstream, like glucose. Researchers have previously identified other nutrients that serve as fuel sources for pancreatic cancer this study adds uridine to the catalog. The findings, published in Nature, show that cancer cells can adapt when they don't have access to glucose.
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