Tuesday February 17, 1998

Deprived Of Glucose, Some Cancer Cells Die

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1998;95:1511-1516)

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Researchers have discovered that cancer cells self-destruct when they are deprived of glucose, a finding that could lead to new drugs to fight the disease.

Prior to the study, scientists thought that because cancer cells rely heavily on glucose, they would be vulnerable if deprived of the sugar. Dr. Chi Van Dang from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues, gave embryonic mouse cells an unusually active form of a gene known as c-Myc, which many cancer cells use to process glucose and produce energy.

Calling their findings "dramatic," the team reports their study this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"When we bathed cells with high c-Myc levels in a cell medium with no glucose, they destroyed themselves by triggering a cell suicide process called apoptosis," Dang explained in a statement issued by Johns Hopkins. "Cells we hadn't altered stopped moving through the cellular life cycle, staying in the first two stages of cell development, and appeared fine in all other regards."

The investigators replicated the findings by exposing both types of cells to 2-deoxyglucose, a compound that resembles sugar but disrupts glycolysis, the process that produces energy from sugar, when cells absorb it. When used with human tumor samples, 2-deoxyglucose killed some cell lines but spared others.

"The key factor appears to be a suicide-stopping gene, Bcl2, that prevents cells from entering apoptosis too easily," Dang said. "If this gene is active in the cancer cell, the cell is less sensitive to glucose deprivation."

The central nervous system also needs glucose to function properly, but the researchers say that any cancer drug developed based on their findings should cut off tumor cells' ability to get glucose without entering the brain.