Deep inside tumors, where oxygen is scarce, cancer cells are reduced to scrounging metabolites from their surroundings. A particularly valuable metabolite happens to be aspartate. If oxygen-starved cancer cells can pick up aspartate, report scientists based at Rockefeller University, they survive, grow, and proliferate despite their suffocating conditions. The hunger for aspartate, the Rockefeller University scientists suggest, could be exploited in future cancer treatments. For example, treatments could stimulate cancer cells’ appetite for aspartate while interfering with aspartate synthesis and aspartate uptake. Treatments that could prevent aspartate uptake look especially promising now that the Rockefeller team, led by Kivanç Birsoy, head of the Laboratory of Metabolic Regulation and Genetics, has found that the best aspartate scroungers depend on a gene called SLC1A3. Detailed findings appeared June 25 in the journal Nature Cell Biology , in an article entitled, “Aspartate is a limiting metabolite for cancer cell proliferation ...
Original Article: Oxygen-Starved Cancer Cells Languish without Aspartate