What is it about?
Essential amino acids (EAA) are crucial to feed cancer cells metabolism and their enhanced protein synthesis rate associated with an intense division. We have shown that leukemic cells display an addiction to essential amino acids through the upregulation of the EAA membrane transporter LAT1. Pharmacological targeting of LAT1 display important anti-leukemic effects and interfered with mTORC1 activation and decreased levels of the c-myc oncogene.
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Why is it important?
Our findings are important because it is crucial to discover new ways to attack cancer cells. Targeting the EAA addiction is interesting because it will affect preferentially cancer cells and spare normal cells that do not display this addiction.
Perspectives
From our data it can be envisionned to combine the pharmacological blockade of LAT1 with classical chemotherapeutic drugs as we could observed synergistic effects in our in vitro experiments. A phase II clinical trial of the LAT1 inhibitor is currently underway in Japan.
Peyron Jean-Francois
C3M INSERM
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: L-type amino-acid transporter 1 (LAT1): a therapeutic target supporting growth and survival of T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma/T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, Leukemia, December 2014, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/leu.2014.338.
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