A new study in Nature examines what happens when pancreatic cancer cells are deprived of their normal fuel, glucose. Do the cells stop growing? No, they adapt by switching "fuels" to a different, ubiquitous biomolecule, uridine. The authors suggest that this discovery could lead to new treatments for this deadly cancer.
Just because Joe "Crazy Joe" Mercola, perhaps the number one purveyor of health misinformation on the Internet, says something doesn't necessarily make it wrong, but it's a bet I'll take any day. For example, it is now well-accepted that sugar neither causes nor promotes cancer, and once again, Mercola doesn't disappoint: Joe "Crazy Joe" Mercola on Facebook. January 2016. Wrong, as usual. A new study in the journal Nature identifies a mechanism in pancreatic cancer cells that may explain why starving cancer cells of sugar fuel is a fool's mission. It's because cancer cells are perfectly willing to switch to another fuel source – uridine (Figure 1). Figure 1. (L) Glucose, the primary fuel of the body. (R) The chemical structure of uridine diphosphate, an alternate fuel for pancreatic cancer cells. Note that uridine diphosphate contains ribose, which is similar to glucose. The authors state: Given that glucose availability influences the use of uridine-derived ribose, we hypothesized that a glucose-depleted microenvironment triggers [pancreatic cancer cells] to upregulate UPP1 [the gene that makes an enzyme…