Dear All,
We are happy to invite you all to a special Impromptu Seminar on January 29, 2024 at 10:00am:
Speaker: Saverio Tardito (Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute)
Title: "Rethinking our approach to cancer metabolism to deliver patient benefit"
Date: Monday, January 29, 2024, 10:00 am
Venue: Lecture Hall B1, Borschkegasse 4a
Host: Maria Sibilia
About the speaker:
Saverio Tardito is a cancer scientist with the ultimate goal to halt tumour progression in patients by targeting metabolic reactions. His Oncometabolism Lab at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute employs state-of-the-art mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, refined cellular and murine models relevant to human pathology to identify metabolic reactions that confer tissue-selective advantages to cancer cells.
Rethinking Our Approach To Cancer Metabolism To Deliver Patient Benefit
Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in human blood, and glutamine-dependent reactions directly impact cancer initiation and progression, leading to
the development of clinically-safe inhibitors of glutamine metabolism for cancer treatment.
In mammals, glutamine is uniquely synthesized by the enzyme glutamine synthetase. By applying untargeted metabolomics in vivo, Tardito’s lab recently
demonstrated that hepatic glutamine synthetase produces N5-methylglutamine, a glutamine analogue previously undescribed in mammalian metabolism (Villar et
al. Nat Chem Biol 2023). Intriguingly, elevated levels of N5-methylglutamine in urine have been found to predict tumour burden and oncogenic drivers in a
mouse model of liver cancer. Furthermore, ongoing unpublished work from Tardito’s lab shows that the oncogenic WNT activation in the liver imposes a
metabolic vulnerability that can be targeted for hepatocellular carcinoma therapy.