Blocking body's Endocannabinoids effective Liver Cancer

A new study reveals that the liver's Cannabinoid receptors could be targeted to fight liver cancer in some patients; and it offers a way to predict what treatments have the best chance of working.
The study reveals the metabolic processes by which the most common form of liver cancer, Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), is able to grow in oxygen-deprived, or hypoxic, conditions. In doing so, the researchers show how metabolic processes can be modeled to predict which patients will respond to drugs that block CB1 receptors, says Adil Mardinoglu, a systems biologist at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
"This opens up the possibility for a precision-medicine approach to predict if a patient will respond to a specific drug therapy," Mardinoglu says.
"Our study explains why some cancer drugs are not effective in all patients, and what should be done before the treatment of a cancer," Mardinoglu says. "Even though it is the same cance, in this case, liver cancer, it is vital to characterize the tumor before its treatment. Only 30 percent of patients respond to most clinically-used cancer drug available for the treatment of HCC due in part to a lack of patient stratification." The research team found that these oxygen-deprived HCC cells thrive instead on carbon produced by mitochondria, a double-membrane sub-unit of most cells, which is where cellular respiration and energy production takes place. The mitochondria break down short chain fatty acid (acetate) molecules to generate acetyl-CoA, which then provides the carbon source for HCC cells to produce lipids. The protein, mitochondrial acetyl-CoA synthetase (ACSS1), was found to be a key enzyme in this process of tumor growth.