Biologists identify brain tumor weakness
Biologists at MIT and the Whitehead Institute have discovered a vulnerability of brain cancer cells that could be exploited to develop more-effective drugs against brain tumors. The study, led by researchers from the Whitehead Institute and MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, found that a subset of glioblastoma tumor cells is dependent on a particular enzyme that breaks down the amino acid glycine. Without this enzyme, toxic metabolic byproducts build up inside the tumor cells, and they die. Blocking this enzyme in glioblastoma cells could offer a new way to combat such tumors, says Dohoon Kim, a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute and lead author of the study, which appears in the April 8 online edition of Nature. David Sabatini, a professor of biology at MIT and member of the Whitehead Institute, is the paper’s senior author. Matthew Vander Heiden, the Eisen and Chang Career Development Associate Professor of Biology and a...