Belgian researchers have discovered why metastatic cancers most often spread to the lungs.
Metastasis to the lungs is observed in more than half of all metastatic cancer cases, i.e. patients with a localised tumour that may spread to other parts of the body.
Professor Sarah-Maria Fendt and her team at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology have been investigating this metastasis migration process. Their study, published in the British scientific journal Nature, shows that this hitherto unexplained migration is in fact linked to the availability of aspartic acid.
The Belgian researchers focused their research on the process by which genes are triggered to make proteins, with the premise that a change in this process can promote the growth of cancer cells.
The eIF5A protein initiates this process. However, in the cells of lung metastases, the scientists analysed an altered form of this eIF5A protein due to aspartic acid activation.
Now that the causes of this metastasis migration have been identified, treatments targeting the mechanism are bound to be available in the very near future.
