Turning a cancer cell’s greed against itself

TheoryLab

How can we use the exceptional greed of cancer cells against them? They gobble up all the resources in their local environment, spread to another area, and then gobble up more resources. Thales Papagiannakopoulos, PhD, explains that there’s a cost to that. A cancer cell takes a lot of fuel, but it produces a lot of waste. It has a few tricks for getting rid of that waste, such as taking advantage of antioxidants in our diet, but Dr. Papagiannakopoulos and his team are exploring some innovative approaches to this problem. In this conversation, Dr. Papagiannakopoulos takes us through cancer metabolism and the implications of ACS-funded cancer research that has moved into clinical trials. 3:30 - Thales Papagiannakopoulos, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine 4:26 –What does metabolism do for normal cells? How does the metabolism of immune cells help them fight off infections? 9:03 – How does a cell’s need for energy change as it becomes a cancer cell? 11:06 – Cancer cells as factories 15:02 – How a higher metabolism can also damage cancer cells… 17:01 – How cancer cells accumulate and clear out free radicals 23:50 – How cancer cells take advantage of antioxidants in our diet 26:44 – Exciting therapeutic implications resulting from these insights 32:17 – How ACS funding helped move his research into clinical trials