Eli5: Since Mitochondria play an important role in cancer through macromolecular synthesis and energy production, why are we not targeting those energy path ways to exhaust cancer?

Question

Eli5: Since Mitochondria play an important role in cancer through macromolecular synthesis and energy production, why are we not targeting those energy path ways to exhaust cancer?

In: 3

Answer 1

People actually are! There are some recent studies showing that targeting mitochondrial gene expression machinery can be an effective cancer therapeutic in mice. It seems to be fairly specific to cancerous cells and didn’t disrupt non-cancerous cells. I think the idea being that it will be taken up preferentially by cancer cells due to their rate of growth and division.

If you’re interested in what the drug does, it specifically targets POLRMT, which is the enzyme that makes RNA from the mitochondrial genome.

Source: I’m a mitochondrial biologist