Harvard Scientists Aim To Stop Cancer In Its Tracks

Shuntros writes "BBC News is reporting progress from scientists at Harvard Medical School towards strangling the growth of cancer cells. By starving cells of a certain type of enzyme, growth essentially ceases. 'The fact that proliferating cancer are able to consume glucose at a much higher rate than normal cells was first discovered by the German Nobel prize-winning chemist Otto Warburg more than 75 years ago. He also showed that the amount of glucose the cells needed to keep their vital signs ticking over was minimal, allowing them grow and divide at the prodigious rate usually associated with foetal cells.' Certainly not a cure by any stretch of the imagination, but putting the brakes on cancer growth in this way is very much akin to the revolution that was AZT."

Comments

Still need an inhibitor

[Btarlinian]

While this discovery is of great importance, we still need to find an inhibitor for this enzyme that will not also inhibit normal pyruvate kinases. BTW, if anyone is interested in reading more about the discovery, Harvard Medical School has a more detailed press release and the two related articles in Nature can be found here (protein structure) and here (relationship to cancer). We haven't gotten to AZT yet, but this is a pretty large step towards finding a sort of "magic bullet" for tumors. At the very least, it's a common weakness most cancerous cells share.

Promising result

[Armakuni]

Apparently, the major problem with cancer is that it isnt't just one disease, it's a whole myriad of conditions with one common characteristic - uncontrolled cell division. Finding one factor that brakes or halts growth in all cancers is a bit of a holy grail for scientists, and this enzyme seems to have at least some of the hallmarks.

Re:Wonderful editorial work

[Btarlinian]

The editors missed the most important fact. This is the enzyme which is actually inhibited by DiChloroAcetic Acid which was recently reported as the Wonder Drug by other groups of scientists. DCA inhibits pyruvate kinases, not just the M2 variety discovered and reported in the Nature article. That's why its side effects are so problematic. After all, normal cells do undergo glycolysis (the Krebs cycle, i.e., aerobic respiration, cannot continue without the products of glycolysis), it's just not as large a fraction of their energy source as tumors. The activity of DCA is simply based upon the Warburg effect, not on the inhibition of this specific variety of pyruvate kinase.

Re:Really disappointed in our Cancer researchers.

[pauljlucas]

Gene therapy = failure.

You're not keeping up. Chronic Myeloid Leukemia has been cured by gene therapy. The problem, as another poster pointed out, is that "cancer" is a broad label for many thousands of individual diseases. A particular gene therapy targets only one kind of cancer.