Scientists at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have identified key metabolic mechanisms that squamous cell skin cancers use to resist treatment, offering new insights into how to potentially stop cancer growth. Their findings, published in Science Advances , highlight the need for combination therapies that target multiple metabolic pathways simultaneously. This approach could lead to more effective therapies not only for squamous cell skin cancer, which forms in cells on the surface of the skin, but also for the myriad other cancers that share similar metabolic hallmarks.
The research was led by senior author William Lowry, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA. In 2019, Lowry and his colleagues overturned a fundamental doctrine of cancer metabolism theory known as the Warburg effect, which stated that cancer cells primarily rely on glucose for energy. Instead, they found that squamous cell skin cancer cells are metabolically flexible: When glucose is unavailable, they can switch to deriving energy from the amino acid glutamine.
"Our data suggest that the reason previous clinical efforts to target cancer metabolism have failed is that they focused on just one pathway at a time," said Lowry, associate director of education and technology transfer at the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center. "In a living organism, there are multiple nutrients available that tumors can use to fuel their growth, ma.
