A team of scientists from The Australian National University are reportedly close to finding a cure for cancer.
The team, led by Professor Stefan Bröer, revealed that they identified a key supply route that diseased cells manipulate, to obtain nutrients.
They then blocked gateways through which the cancer cell was obtaining the amino acid glutamine and found the cells almost completely stopped growing.
Professor Stefan Bröer said: ‘This is likely to work in a wide range of cancers, because it is a very common mechanism in cancer cells.’
‘Better still, this should lead to chemotherapy with much less serious side-effects, as normal cells do not use glutamine as a building material.
‘Crucial white blood cells, which current treatments damage, could be spared, and it could cut out the hair loss that chemotherapy causes.’
Lead author Angelika Bröer spearheaded the effort to identify and genetically knock out glutamine transporters.
‘It is an exciting time to do cancer research,’ she said.
‘We now have precision tools in our hands to manipulate the genome of cancer cells, allowing us to address problems that were difficult to solve previously.’
The results are published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.