Starving cancer the key to new treatments »

ANU researchers have found a vital supply route that cancer cells use to obtain their nutrients, in a discovery that could lead to new treatments to stop the growth of tumours. The research team blocked gateways through which the cancer cell was obtaining the amino acid glutamine and found the cells almost completely stopped growing. "This is likely to work in a wide range of cancers, because it is a very common mechanism in cancer cells," said lead researcher Professor Stefan Bröer, from ANU Research School of Biology. "Better still, this should lead to chemotherapy with much less serious side-effects, as normal cells do not use glutamine as a building material. "Crucial white blood cells, which current treatments damage, could be spared, and it could cut out the hair loss that chemotherapy causes." There are 917 different types of cancer currently identified, and many cures work only for a single type of the disease or become ineffective as cancers develop resistance to chemotherapy. However Professor Bröer said the new approach would be less prone to resistance because blocking the glutamine transport mechanism is an external process that would be hard for cancer cells to get around. The team first attempted a glutamine blockade by genetically altering cancer cells to disable their main glutamine transporter.