Glioblastoma is notorious as the most lethal form of malignant brain tumor, with most patients surviving just one or two years after diagnosis. Part of what makes these tumors so aggressive is their ability to hijack normal cells’ metabolic processes, causing them to grow rapidly and invade healthy brain tissue. A groundbreaking study, reported by World Pharma News, from the University of Michigan, published in Nature, now suggests that changing what we eat could open up new ways to fight this deadly cancer.
The research, a collaboration between the Rogel Cancer Center, Neurosurgery, and Biomedical Engineering departments, focused on how glioblastoma tumors use glucose—our body’s main sugar fuel. By injecting labeled sugars into both mice and brain cancer patients, the team tracked the fate of glucose inside the brain. They discovered that while both healthy brain tissue and cancerous cells rely on sugar, they use it for vastly different ends.
In healthy brains, sugar is converted into energy and neurotransmitters essential for thinking and normal functioning. However, glioblastoma cells redirect glucose down a different path, turning it into nucleotides, the raw materials for making DNA and RNA, which allows the tumor to grow and spread. “It’s a metabolic fork in the road,” explained Dr. Andrew Scott, a research scholar on the team. Where healthy brain cells use sugar for maintenance, cancer cells use it to build more of themselves.
Another crucial difference emerged in how cells handle amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Normal brain tissue makes amino acids from sugar, but glioblastoma cells shut off this process and instead scavenge amino acids—specifically serine and glycine—from the blood. This insight led researchers to experiment with diets in which these amino acids were restricted. Mice fed such diets responded better to radiation and chemotherapy, and their tumors shrank compared to those on regular diets.
To further understand and predict the effects of these dietary changes, the team developed mathematical models mapping how glucose travels through different metabolic pathways. These models could help pinpoint which “roads” (metabolic pathways) are most critical for cancer growth and where a “roadblock” (drug or dietary intervention) would have the most impact.
Professor Costas Lyssiotis likened normal brain metabolism to a slow country road and cancer metabolism to a busy freeway. Blocking the flow of serine on this metabolic “freeway” could selectively slow down tumor growth without harming normal brain function.
Encouraged by these findings, the team is preparing clinical trials to test whether specialized diets that limit blood serine levels can help glioblastoma patients. “This is a study that no individual investigator could do on their own,” said Dr. Daniel Wahl, highlighting the multidisciplinary nature of the research.
While current treatments for glioblastoma—surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—eventually face resistance as tumors adapt metabolically, these new discoveries offer hope. By targeting the unique metabolic needs of cancer cells through dietary adjustments, researchers are paving the way for innovative, more effective therapies for brain cancer patients.
