Reseachers from the Harvard Medical School have recently identifed the enzyme, known as pyruvate kinase, that allows cancer cells to consume the large amounts of glucose that are necessary for their growth and continued propagation. Pyruvate kinase comes in two distinct forms, but only one of the forms—the PKM2 form—enables the consumption of glucose at the rate necessary to sustain tumor growth. When reserachers learned how to knock out PKM2 production and force the enzyme into its other form, they discovered they could stop the growth of the cancerous cells. When they tested this therapy in mice, they found that tumorgenesis was significantly inhibited.

Reserachers have known that tumors consume large amounts of glucose since the pioneering work of Otto Warburn, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, discovered this over seventy years ago, but until this discovery they have not been able to develop therapies based on the knowledge. PET Scans, one of the major imaging modalities used in cancer diagnostics, are used to identify body-wide tumor growth by using radioactive tracers to examine areas of accelarated glucose consumption. PET has been a hugely successful diagnostic technology and is one of the prime examples of how science has previously incorporated the knowledge of glucose consumption into medicine.

With this discovery, doctors are now hopeful that new treatments can be developed that will literally starve the cancer of glucose and, therefore, stop tumor growth altogther. While the researchers note that all the forms of cancer they looked at during their review exhibitd this enzyme, whatever treatments are created with it will almost certainly have to take into consideration the particular metabolic activity of the individual cancers. More research is certainly needed to confirm these findings, but it appears that the discovery of pyruvate kinase represents a real advancement in our knowledge of the bio-chemical processes that underlie cancerous growth.

Labels: cancer, mesothelioma