The "self-eating" of cancer cells could represent a novel treatment target.

So the tumor microenvironment of pancreatic tumors tends to be what we describe as nutrient poor. So the cancer cells have less access than many normal cells to the sugars and other important nutrients that help cells proliferate. And so because of that, pancreatic cancer cells have developed these sort of alternative adaptive mechanisms.

That allow them to take up nutrients differently from their environment and also use them differently once they get into the cell. One of these processes is autophagy which some people might have heard of as self eating. So this is when the cell actually breaks down things that are already inside the cell, whether they they're organelles or proteins and uses the fuel that they generate from those to help them proliferate. And sort of where we went with our story is that we found this.

Pathway called mytopagy. So this is a form of autophagy where specifically the mitochondria are broken down and then recycled for their different parts. We found that this pathway seems to be one of the ways that pancreatic cancer cells adapts to those low nutrient environments. So one of the things that we hope to do now is sort of see how we can harness our understanding of this altered.

Sugar metabolism and also changes in mitochondrial dynamics into a therapeutic strategy for patients.