{"id":197830,"date":"2025-09-03T21:25:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T21:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/197830\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T21:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T21:25:11","slug":"brain-tumours-in-mice-grow-more-slowly-when-starved-of-key-amino-acid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/197830\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain tumours in mice grow more slowly when starved of key amino acid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A highly lethal type of brain tumour<\/a> often steals key nutrients to aid its aggressive growth \u2014 a habit that can be exploited to slow the cancer\u2019s spread, scientists have found1<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Experiments show that many brain tumours called glioblastomas<\/a> grab serine, a crucial amino acid, from their environment rather than synthesizing it themselves: a metabolic Achilles\u2019 heel. The scientists fed mice with certain kinds of glioblastoma a diet that lacked serine and found that the rodents\u2019 tumours, unable to get their fix the usual way, grew more slowly. The animals also lived longer.<\/p>\n

The paper \u201crepresents a big advance in the field\u201d, says Sheila Singh, a neurosurgeon\u2013scientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not involved with the work. \u201cThey\u2019ve actually found a metabolic vulnerability of glioblastoma that can be exploited with a therapeutic strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work was published on 3 September in Nature.<\/p>\n

Ruthless disease<\/p>\n

Glioblastomas invade brain tissue with lightning speed and almost always regrow after treatment, which typically involves surgery and a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. Most people who are diagnosed with this type of cancer survive only 1\u20132 years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Deadly brain cancer shrinks after CAR-T therapy \u2014 but for how long is unclear<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Tumours filch sugar and other resources from their hosts. Cancers then use this loot to run their own metabolic pathways \u2014 the network of chemical processes that turn food into useful molecules \u2014 doing \u201cwhatever it takes to grow and grow and grow,\u201d says study co-author Andrew Scott, a cancer neuroscientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.<\/p>\n

To understand how that strategy works for glioblastomas, the authors of the Nature paper studied eight people who underwent surgery to remove their brain tumours. During surgery, physicians infused the participants with sugar molecules that were labelled with a particular carbon isotope. The researchers then analysed samples of the participants\u2019 tumours and surrounding brain tissue.<\/p>\n

By tracking the isotopes, the team found that some glioblastomas use sugar that is taken from their surroundings to make materials such as the basic ingredients for DNA. This helps tumours to grow wildly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A highly lethal type of brain tumour often steals key nutrients to aid its aggressive growth \u2014 a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":197831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4465,235,10046,1251,10047,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-197830","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-brain","9":"tag-cancer","10":"tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","11":"tag-metabolism","12":"tag-multidisciplinary","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115142480688886367","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}