* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Entertainment lineup released for 2025 Mississippi State Fair – WAPT

    Exciting Entertainment Lineup Unveiled for the 2025 Mississippi State Fair!

    After Denzel Washington Said He Would Be In Black Panther 3, Ryan Coogler Explained Why He’s ‘Fine’ With That Information Being Revealed So Early – Yahoo

    Ryan Coogler Shares Why He’s Cool with Denzel Washington’s Black Panther 3 Reveal!

    Traveling Tacos and Tequila Festival to stop at Florence Yall’s stadium this October – Cincinnati Enquirer

    Get Ready for a Flavor Fiesta: Traveling Tacos and Tequila Festival Hits Florence Y’all’s Stadium This October!

    9 things to do this weekend in Lake County plus a look ahead – Leesburg Daily Commercial

    Discover 9 Exciting Weekend Adventures in Lake County and What’s Coming Up!

    Shows to Watch – The Advocate

    Must-See Shows You Can’t Miss!

    Fox News Entertainment Newsletter: Celebrities mentioned during Diddy’s high-profile sex trafficking trial – Fox News

    Fox News Entertainment Newsletter: Celebrities mentioned during Diddy’s high-profile sex trafficking trial – Fox News

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Fire Tech Brief: 5 Fire Apparatus Technology Upgrades – firehouse.com

    Revving Up Safety: 5 Innovative Upgrades for Fire Apparatus Technology

    U.S. FDA Grants Platform Technology Designation to the Viral Vector Used in SRP-9003, Sarepta’s Investigational Gene Therapy for the Treatment of Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy Type 2E/R4 – Sarepta Therapeutics

    Breakthrough for Gene Therapy: FDA Designates Viral Vector in Sarepta’s SRP-9003 for Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy Treatment

    Waunakee Fifth-Graders Dive into the Future at Exciting Tech Day!

    Property Technology Magazine Unveils “PropTech Top 50 Index” and the “2025 PropTech Trends Report – The Great Rebuild.” – Business Wire

    Property Technology Magazine Unveils “PropTech Top 50 Index” and the “2025 PropTech Trends Report – The Great Rebuild.” – Business Wire

    Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) Stock Price Expected to Rise, UBS Group Analyst Says – MarketBeat

    UBS Analyst Predicts Surge in Micron Technology Stock Price!

    Domo to Participate in the D.A. Davidson Technology Summit – Business Wire

    Domo Set to Shine at the D.A. Davidson Technology Summit!

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Entertainment lineup released for 2025 Mississippi State Fair – WAPT

    Exciting Entertainment Lineup Unveiled for the 2025 Mississippi State Fair!

    After Denzel Washington Said He Would Be In Black Panther 3, Ryan Coogler Explained Why He’s ‘Fine’ With That Information Being Revealed So Early – Yahoo

    Ryan Coogler Shares Why He’s Cool with Denzel Washington’s Black Panther 3 Reveal!

    Traveling Tacos and Tequila Festival to stop at Florence Yall’s stadium this October – Cincinnati Enquirer

    Get Ready for a Flavor Fiesta: Traveling Tacos and Tequila Festival Hits Florence Y’all’s Stadium This October!

    9 things to do this weekend in Lake County plus a look ahead – Leesburg Daily Commercial

    Discover 9 Exciting Weekend Adventures in Lake County and What’s Coming Up!

    Shows to Watch – The Advocate

    Must-See Shows You Can’t Miss!

    Fox News Entertainment Newsletter: Celebrities mentioned during Diddy’s high-profile sex trafficking trial – Fox News

    Fox News Entertainment Newsletter: Celebrities mentioned during Diddy’s high-profile sex trafficking trial – Fox News

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Fire Tech Brief: 5 Fire Apparatus Technology Upgrades – firehouse.com

    Revving Up Safety: 5 Innovative Upgrades for Fire Apparatus Technology

    U.S. FDA Grants Platform Technology Designation to the Viral Vector Used in SRP-9003, Sarepta’s Investigational Gene Therapy for the Treatment of Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy Type 2E/R4 – Sarepta Therapeutics

    Breakthrough for Gene Therapy: FDA Designates Viral Vector in Sarepta’s SRP-9003 for Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy Treatment

    Waunakee Fifth-Graders Dive into the Future at Exciting Tech Day!

    Property Technology Magazine Unveils “PropTech Top 50 Index” and the “2025 PropTech Trends Report – The Great Rebuild.” – Business Wire

    Property Technology Magazine Unveils “PropTech Top 50 Index” and the “2025 PropTech Trends Report – The Great Rebuild.” – Business Wire

    Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) Stock Price Expected to Rise, UBS Group Analyst Says – MarketBeat

    UBS Analyst Predicts Surge in Micron Technology Stock Price!

    Domo to Participate in the D.A. Davidson Technology Summit – Business Wire

    Domo Set to Shine at the D.A. Davidson Technology Summit!

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home Science

This Lab Turned Their COVID Success Into a Cancer-Fighting Mission – Here’s How

March 6, 2024
in Science
This Lab Turned Their COVID Success Into a Cancer-Fighting Mission – Here’s How
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Neutrons Seek To Stop Cancer From Hijacking a Metabolic Highway

Neutron experiments helped reveal the one-carbon enzymatic mechanism that synthesizes vital food sources for cancer cells that depend on vitamin B6, providing key insights into designing novel drugs to slow the spread of aggressive cancers. Credit: Jill Hemman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are advancing cancer treatment research by designing drugs that target the metabolic pathways cancer cells rely on for growth. By mapping the structure of a key enzyme with neutrons and X-rays, they aim to develop treatments for aggressive cancers, including lung and breast cancer.

After a highly lauded research campaign that successfully redesigned a hepatitis C drug into one of the leading drug treatments for COVID-19, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are now turning their drug design approach toward cancer.

In a recent study, published in the journal Communications Chemistry, the team used neutrons and X-rays to draw a roadmap of every atom, chemical bond, and electrical charge inside a key enzyme that belongs to a metabolic pathway that cancer cells dramatically overuse to reproduce.

This new information essentially helps pave the way for developing new drugs that act as roadblocks along the metabolic pathway to cut off the supply of vital resources to cancer cells. The drugs would be designed to target highly aggressive tumor-forming cancers that too often become terminal, such as lung, colon, breast, pancreatic, and prostate cancers.

Understanding Cancer at the Atomic Level

“With more than 200 types, cancer continues to be a devastating disease,” said ORNL senior scientist Andrey Kovalevsky. “That means, if we’re ever going to beat the disease, it’s going to require exploring every option and studying every aspect of the disease at every level — from tumors, cells, and molecules down to individual atoms.”

Kovalevsky said this research represents a renewed interest in studying metabolic pathways as targets for developing anti-cancer drug treatments. Metabolic pathways are a series of chemical reactions inside a cell wherein the product of one reaction becomes the base material, or substrate, for the next reaction.

A specific pathway of interest to Kovalevsky and his team is the one-carbon metabolism pathway, or 1C, which uses enzymes that transfer carbon units from one biomolecule to another. This action plays a crucial role in synthesizing important biological molecules such as amino acids, DNA and RNA. In other words, 1C units are like fuel sources that cells need to grow and multiply. That also means they’re vital for the uncontrollable proliferation of cancer cells as well.

“This research is interesting in that the molecules we’re planning to design would be metabolic drugs, which were some of the first drugs — like methotrexate — that were developed to treat cancer. Over the years, research has gone in other directions to study other pathways,” said Kovalevsky. “But recently there’s been a reignition, or return, to the metabolic drugs because you really need a multitude of different intervention options, sometimes at the same time to battle all the different types of cancer.”

Pioneering Drug Design With Neutron Scattering

One of the crucial enzymes within the 1C pathway is serine hydroxymethyltransferase, or SHMT. SHMT is responsible for initiating the lion’s share of 1C reactions for the cell. And, currently, no approved anti-cancer drugs exist that target SHMT specifically.

“The 1C metabolism pathway is ‘hijacked’ by many types of cancer. If you think of this pathway as a highway, SHMT is the on-ramp cancer takes to hijack traffic,” said postdoctoral researcher Victoria Drago, the study’s lead author. “Blocking the enzyme with inhibitors or ‘roadblocks’ prevents cancer cells from using the highway, effectively cutting off their fuel supply, thereby preventing them from spreading.”

But designing a drug requires a detailed understanding of the enzyme structure and how the structure underpins its function at the atomic level. For this, the team used a combination of neutron and x-ray scattering experiments to map the location of every atom in the enzyme structure as well as the network of chemical bonds and the corresponding electrical charges.

Knowing how small molecules attach to the enzyme is the key to designing matching drug molecules — like putting together puzzle pieces in 3D — but the pieces not only have to match in shape but also in electrical charge. Kovalevsky likened it to using the right battery with the correct size and orientation to power specific electronic devices.

In contrast to x-rays, which are more sensitive to heavy elements such as carbon, neutrons are ideal for studying light elements such as hydrogen and are useful in determining the electrical charges and mapping the enzyme-drug interactions.

Neutrons are especially important in that hydrogen atoms make up approximately 50% of all atoms in biological systems, and their presence also plays a significant role in determining the strength of chemical bonds between a drug molecule and an enzyme.

To track the hydrogen atoms, the researchers used the neutron instruments MANDI and IMAGINE at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source, or SNS, and High Flux Isotope Reactor, or HFIR. The neutron experiments allowed the team to observe how the SHMT enzyme binds its physiological molecule — serine amino acid — to initiate the chemical reaction, as well as how the enzyme directs the transfer of atoms in the critical steps leading up to the complex reaction sequence. More importantly, the study confirmed how it’s possible to trap serine right before it moves into the pocket where the chemical reaction takes place.

“There have been proposals over the years about the enzyme’s catalytic mechanism and how it functions, but now we know for sure,” said Kovalevsky. “It’s only by pinpointing all the atoms in the active site along the reaction pathway of this enzyme that we gain the knowledge we need to design better drugs that add to the multiple intervention strategies for fighting cancer.”

The research represents a significant first step on the way to realizing a novel drug treatment. The next steps in the research campaign involve studying the enzyme in different reaction stages and testing it against existing drug inhibitors.

The neutron research is part of a larger effort funded by the National Institutes of Health to study a broad class of enzymes similar to SHMT that rely on a single derivative of vitamin B6 to perform more than 140 different chemical reactions.

“The overproduction of SHMT has been linked to the further decline of patients suffering from aggressive forms of cancer,” said Drago. “Developing a more effective treatment that reduces the rate of cancer progression could be just the thing that makes all the difference in someone’s life.”

Reference: “Revealing protonation states and tracking substrate in serine hydroxymethyltransferase with room-temperature X-ray and neutron crystallography” by Victoria N. Drago, Claudia Campos, Mattea Hooper, Aliyah Collins, Oksana Gerlits, Kevin L. Weiss, Matthew P. Blakeley, Robert S. Phillips and Andrey Kovalevsky, 3 August 2023, Communications Chemistry.
DOI: 10.1038/s42004-023-00964-9

In addition to Kovalevsky and Drago, the study’s coauthors include Claudia Campos, Mattea Hooper, Aliyah Collins, Oksana Gerlits, Kevin L. Weiss, Matthew P. Blakeley and Robert S. Phillips. Complementary neutron and x-ray measurements were performed at the Institut Laue-Langevin, France, and the Advanced Photon Source, or APS, at Argonne National Laboratory.

HFIR, SNS, and APS are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : SciTechDaily – https://scitechdaily.com/this-lab-turned-their-covid-success-into-a-cancer-fighting-mission-heres-how/

Tags: scienceTheirTurned
Previous Post

Research Reveals How Melatonin Boosts Long-Term Memory

Next Post

1,000x Faster: Ultrafast Photonics Chip Reshapes Signal Processing

Drought expanded to 19 more watersheds – Washington State Department of Ecology (.gov)

Severe Drought Worsens: 19 Additional Watersheds Affected!

June 7, 2025
CULT Food Science Closes Debt Settlement – TradingView

CULT Food Science Closes Debt Settlement – TradingView

June 7, 2025
Harmony Public Schools’ science-focused campus to open soon at City Place – Community Impact

Harmony Public Schools’ science-focused campus to open soon at City Place – Community Impact

June 7, 2025
Ladies Lifestyle Network cuts ribbon – haysfreepress.com

Ladies Lifestyle Network cuts ribbon – haysfreepress.com

June 7, 2025
Watch fans celebrate as Uzbekistan secures debut World Cup qualification – CNN

Watch fans celebrate as Uzbekistan secures debut World Cup qualification – CNN

June 7, 2025
Dollar advances against peers after strong US economic data – Reuters

Dollar advances against peers after strong US economic data – Reuters

June 7, 2025
Entertainment lineup released for 2025 Mississippi State Fair – WAPT

Exciting Entertainment Lineup Unveiled for the 2025 Mississippi State Fair!

June 7, 2025
Water-cleaning bacteria can produce health, economic benefits – ASU News

Revolutionary Water-Cleaning Bacteria: Unlocking Health and Economic Benefits!

June 7, 2025
The end of the affair? – The Economist

Is This the Final Chapter of Their Love Story

June 7, 2025
Fire Tech Brief: 5 Fire Apparatus Technology Upgrades – firehouse.com

Revving Up Safety: 5 Innovative Upgrades for Fire Apparatus Technology

June 7, 2025

Categories

Archives

June 2025
MTWTFSS
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30 
« May    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (673)
  • Economy (687)
  • Entertainment (21,593)
  • General (15,267)
  • Health (9,728)
  • Lifestyle (690)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (688)
  • Politics (694)
  • Science (15,905)
  • Sports (21,190)
  • Technology (15,672)
  • World (672)

Recent News

Drought expanded to 19 more watersheds – Washington State Department of Ecology (.gov)

Severe Drought Worsens: 19 Additional Watersheds Affected!

June 7, 2025
CULT Food Science Closes Debt Settlement – TradingView

CULT Food Science Closes Debt Settlement – TradingView

June 7, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version