A non-toxic strategy to treat leukemia

September 11, 2014

Harvard/MIT team finds that killing cancer cells by disrupting their metabolism doesn’t harm normal cells



“It’s been known for decades that cancer cells use energy differently than most cell types,” said senior author David Scadden, MD. “So we thought, maybe there are metabolism differences between blood stem cells and their immediate descendants; and are they so different from cancer that you might able to manipulate energy sources with something that could have an effect on cancer and not harm normal cells?”


“That was an interesting distinction between these two cell types,” said Scadden, the Harvard University Gerald and Darlene Jordan Professor of Medicine. “They have very different functions, and you might imagine they’re going to use their nutrients very differently, but nobody had defined that before.”

The investigators next introduced genes that are corrupted to cause the parental blood stem cells and their offspring to become cancerous (they respectively give rise to chronic and acute leukemia) and subjected the cancer cells to the same glucose manipulations as their normal counterparts. They team found that regardless of which cell they started in, the leukemia cells were sensitive to both the glucose on-off switch and volume dial.

“One of the major hurdles for cancer therapy is that while the drugs are effective in killing cancer cells, they are toxic to normal cells,” said study first author Ying-Hua Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Scadden Lab. “In this study, we found a way to differentiate sensitivity between normal and malignant cells, suggesting a potential therapeutic angle.”

“Cancer cells are not like normal cells in a lot of ways, but one of them is that they get locked into a particular way of behaving,” Scadden said. “These cells are so singular in the way they handle glucose that they create a unique opportunity to intervene. Normal cells don’t get so disrupted because they have other energy mechanisms in place.”


The Cell study was highly collaborative, including work and insights from Matthew Vander Heiden, MD, PhD, and graduate student William Israelsen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Broad Institute Director of the Metabolite Profiling Platform Clary Clish, PhD; and cancer biologist Lewis Cantley, PhD, of Weill Cornell Medical College.

The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, (including an NIH-HSCI Training Grant); the American Cancer Society; Massachusetts General Hospital; the Proton Therapy Research and Treatment Center; BD Biosciences; a Bullock-Wellman Fellowship; a Tosteson & Fund for Medical Discovery Fellowship; the Smith family; the Stern family; the Burroughs Wellcome Fund; the Ludwig Foundation; and the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.

Cited: Wang, YH, et. al., Cell state-specific metabolic dependency in hematopoiesis and leukemogenesis. Cell. September 11, 2014. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2014.07.048

Photo: Blood cancer (acute myeloid leukemia) cells. (Credit: Ying-Hua Wang, PhD)