Cancer cells thrive in recycled cell debris, and preventing access to this natural resource "Pac-Man", the process seems to stop tumor growth and expansion.
We have known for a while in order to boost its growth abnormally fast and greedy, cancer cells need energy cells as glucose or sugar. However, what has not been so clear is how and where they get it from: until now.
In his article, the lead author, Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, a professor of molecular and developmental biology, anatomy and structural biology and medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and colleagues describe how cancer cells are tap a natural process of recycling cell known as "autophagy," which literally means "self-feeding."
During autophagy, specialized compartments called lysosomes Cell recycling of small units to walk as the "Pac-Man" game to engulf everything in its path, if not worn attached to proteins and other cellular materials worn and recycled for new cell growth and development.
Cuervo and colleagues found that cancer cells accelerate this natural process.
Lysosomes are not just trash, Crow says the press, are more like "recycling plants in which little energy is converted into cellular debris."
"Cancer cells seem to have learned how to optimize this system to get the energy they need," he said.
The recycling process in particular, she and her colleagues examined is called chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA). In CMA, small protein "chaperones" guide the waste material to the lysosome for recycling.
Cuervo and colleagues discovered unusually high levels of CMA in more than 40 types of human tumors, but not in surrounding healthy tissue.
