Cell Metabol: Scientists have developed a new technology that can parse cellular energy code, promising to help improve the treatment of multiple cancers

4, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Cell Metabolism, scientists from the French National Centre for Scientific Research and others reported on a new strategy that promises to help develop individualized anticancer therapies, a patented technique that can explain the energy state of cells, an indicator of cell activity, and could help develop better cancer therapies by analyzing the cell's energy code.
Photo Source: CC0 Public Domain Currently, immunotherapy is a promising anti-cancer tool that works by mobilizing the host immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells; however, only one-third of patients respond to immunotherapy, and tumor microenvironments often negatively affect immune cells and deprive them of their energy sources, reducing the effectiveness of the therapy; and the energy status of multiple types of immune cells is a hallmark of their activity, especially the anti-cancer activity of immune cells.
to enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy, researchers need to develop an easy way to analyze the energy properties of immune cells from tumor samples. the
technique, called SCENITH, is a new method developed by researchers that can help identify the sources of energy that different cells in a tumor depend on and, more importantly, clarify the specific energy needs of immune cells in adverse environments (tumor micro-environments), which can be used as indicators of cellular energy status using levels of protein synthesis, which accounts for half of the cell's energy consumption.
The researchers divided the living tissue sample into subsites, each using a metabolic path inhibitor that generates energy from the cells, and then used a flow cytometer to determine the level of protein synthesis, which might classify the different cell types in the sample and identify the cell surface markers targeted by the therapy.
SCENITH technology can identify the energy state of each immune cell or cancer cell in the tumor, its energy source, and the metabolic path pathlines on which it depends.
Now that researchers hope to use the new technology to conduct clinical studies to better understand how the technology can be used to predict patients' responses to therapy, researchers hope to find more partners to work together to identify characteristics associated with different responses to immunotherapy and chemotherapy, and hope that SCENITH technology will in the future help develop new individualized anti-cancer therapies and harness the power of the patient's body's immune response to destroy cancer cells.
original source: Rafael J. Argüello, Alexis J. Combes, Remy Char, et al., SCENITH: A Flow Cytometry-Based Method to Functional Profile Energy Energy Metabolism With Single Cell-Resolution, Meta Cellbolism (2020). DOI:10.1016/j.cmet.2020.11.007。