Aggressive and relatively common lymphomas called diffuse large B cell lymphomas (DLBCLs) have a critical metabolic vulnerability that can be exploited to trick these cancers into starving themselves, according to a study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell’s Ithaca campus.
The researchers, whose study was published Dec. 13 in Blood Cancer Discovery, showed that a protein called ATF4, a genetic master-switch that controls the activities of hundreds of genes, has a key role in supporting the fast growth of DLBCLs. The scientists found that silencing ATF4 in DLBCL cells essentially fools the cells into starving themselves and slowing their growth — and that targeting ATF4 along with a closely related metabolic protein, SIRT3, even further enhances this cancer-killing effect.
