The team, which included members of the University of Texas Health Science Center departments of medicine and biochemistry, investigators from the UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and a group of collaborators from Austria, has discovered information that directly links disrupted metabolism (energy production in cells) to a common and often fatal type of lymphoma. The group announced its findings in Nature Communications, as reported in Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150717142435.htm).
According to Medical News Today, lymphoma, a form of cancer that affects the immune system, can occur at any age. It is the most common cancer in young people. Lymphoma is a cancer of immune cells called lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell. There are two broad types of lymphoma -- Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's -- and many subtypes. Lymphoma is often very treatable, and most people live for a long time after being diagnosed
(http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/146136.php)
"The link between metabolism and cancer has been proposed or inferred to exist for a long time, but what is more scarce is evidence for a direct connection -- genetic mutations in metabolic enzymes," explains senior author Ricardo C.T. Aguiar, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of hematology-oncology in the School of Medicine and a faculty scientist with the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at the UT Health Science Center and the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, Audie L. Murphy Division. "We have discovered a metabolic imbalance that is oncogenic or pro-cancer."
The team discovered that the gene that codes the enzyme D2-hydroxyglutarate dehydrogenase (D2HGDH) is "mutated in a subset of cancers called diffuse large B-cell lymphomas," the Science Daily article says. "The mutated lymphoma cell displays a deficiency of a metabolite called alpha-ketoglutarate (?-KG), which is needed in steady levels for cells to be healthy."
According to Dr. Aguiar, "When the levels of ?-KG are abnormally low, another class of enzymes called dioxygenases don't function properly, resulting in a host of additional disturbances. Because ?-KG has been recently identified as a critical regulator of aging and stem cell maintenance, the implications of our findings are broad and not limited to cancer biology."