Team led by lecturer Antonio Gentilella. Photo: IDIBELL
Researchers of the University of Barcelona and IDIBELL have found a mechanism that could explain the reappearance of tumours after clinical treatment. According to their research study, tumour cells are able to detect when the levels of nutrients and energy decrease, and they enter a low energy consumption mode and store all the necessary material to reactivate their growth afterwards.
This ability allows tumour cells to "wake up" quickly once the situation is re-stablished and they can resume cell division. The researchers are now studying how to inhibit the formation of these reservoirs and therefore prevent relapses.
Cancer occurs due to the uncontrolled proliferation of cells, which end up invading and destroying tissues and organs. For a tumour to increase its size, it needs cancer cells to produce all the necessary proteins to create the required biomass to grow and divide. The factories produced by proteins are the ribosomes: therefore, the ability to generate new ribosomes is critical for the most aggressive tumours.
The study, led by Antonio Gentilella, tenure-track 1 lecturer at the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology and principal researcher of the Group on Metabolism and Cancer at IDIBELL, describes the strategy of tumours to continue creating ribosomes under adverse conditions: when cancer cells are in a low-nutrient environment, they can detect so and can send an internal signal so that the LARP1 protein and the 40S ribosomal unit sequester all the mRNAs they need to create ribosomes.
The tumour growth environment, and chemotherapy as well, create unfavourable conditions of lack of nutrients and oxygens that could promote the creation of ribosome reservoirs in the cells that survive these conditions. Therefore, it is easy to think that it could be an important mechanism for the reappearance of tumours after therapy.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, has been funded by the Spanish Association Against Cancer.
