A new theory to kill cancer cells



We may be able to kill cancer by depriving it of sugar. Glucose is a sugar that your body needs to function. The neurons in your brain need it in order to do their jobs. Your brain would literally not work if you don’t have enough glucose. In fact, glucose plays a major role in managing your body’s energy. If you don’t get enough carbohydrates in your diet, your body will begin to synthesize glucose in order to make up the difference.



The bad news is that your neurons are not the only cells that love glucose. It turns out that cancer cells also have a bit of a sweet tooth and cancer’s sugar cravings can be insatiable. When you are performing an intense workout, your muscles undergo a process called glycolysis and burn through glucose quickly. Cancer cells also burn through glucose as quickly as possible. When the cancer cells don’t have glucose to burn, they supplement their diet a protein called glutamine.



After understanding cancer loves glucose and glutamine, researchers hypothesized that they may be to block the import of glucose and halt the metabolism of glutamine in order to stop cancer’s growth. In a journal called Cell Chemical Biology, the discovery of a new molecule was reported. The high-potency molecule is called glutor. It blocks glucose-transport proteins and starves the cancer cells. This is the first molecule to do this, but it is the most efficient.



In the past, molecules either been low-potency or have only blocked one type of protein. In order to properly starve cancer to get the desired results, scientists perform a two-step process. In the first step, the cancer is treated with glutor to shut down its metabolism. This stage was effective in inhibiting growth in 44 cancer lines and non-cancer lines remained unaffected by the glutor. In the next step, researchers block an enzyme for metabolizing glutamine.



The combination of glutor and this blocked enzyme successfully suppressed cancer growth. This process has an obvious appeal to the doctors and patients alike, but there are plenty of obstacles in the way of applying it. The primary block is a legal roadblock. There are currently no FDA-approved drugs that target glucose and glutamine metabolism because all previous drugs were deemed too toxic for humans. So researchers need to prove this method is safe before it can be available to the public