Growing Growing Gone

Sometimes, garden weeds spring up so too quickly for their own good, gobbling all the soil’s space and resources until they wipe themselves out. Something similar happens in cancerous tumours. In their rush to add new cells to the hyperactively dividing cluster, they devour all available oxygen, depriving inner areas of the tumour. These oxygen-low regions, green in the breast cancer pictured, grow more slowly and tend to resist treatment. To determine why, researchers examined how tumour samples from several patients behaved in low oxygen conditions. They discovered that one amino acid – aspartate – is the key. Cells need oxygen to make it, and without it all sorts of processes grind to a halt. When oxygen-starved tumours couldn’t make aspartate themselves, some were able to absorb it from the surroundings. Preventing tumours producing or acquiring aspartate might be a new way to tackle these tricky sections that evade current cancer treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from the Laboratory of Metabolic Regulation and Genetics at The Rockefeller University
• Laboratory of Metabolic Regulation and Genetics, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Cell Biology, June 2018