Back

Hyaluronic Acid Fuels Pancreatic Cancer Growth

Kim, P. K.; Halbrook, C. J.; Kerk, S. A.; Wisner, S.; Kremer, D. M.; Sajjakulnukit, P.; Hou, S. W.; Thurston, G.; Anand, A.; Yan, L.; Salamanca-Cardona, L.; Welling, S. D.; Zhang, L.; Pratt, M. R.; Keshari, K. R.; Ying, H.; Lyssiotis, C. A.

2020-09-15 cancer biology
10.1101/2020.09.14.293803 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Rewired metabolism is a hallmark of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDA). Previously, we demonstrated that PDA cells enhance glycosylation precursor biogenesis through the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway (HBP) via activation of the rate limiting enzyme, glutamine-fructose 6-phosphate amidotransferase 1 (GFAT1). Here, we genetically ablated GFAT1 in PDA cell lines, which completely blocked proliferation in vitro and led to cell death. In contrast, GFAT1 knockout did not impair tumor growth, suggesting that cancer cells can maintain fidelity of glycosylation precursor pools by scavenging nutrients from the tumor microenvironment. Here, we show that hyaluronic acid (HA), an abundant carbohydrate polymer in pancreatic tumors composed of repeating N-acetyl-glucosamine (GlcNAc) and glucuronic acid sugars, can bypass GFAT1 to refuel the HBP via the GlcNAc salvage pathway. Furthermore, HA facilitates proliferation in nutrient-starved wild-type PDA. Together, these data show HA can serve as a nutrient fueling PDA metabolism beyond its previously appreciated structural and signaling roles.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.