One key for targeting therapy to cancer cells and not harming normal cells is finding out what makes cancer cells different. A molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is trying to discover the cellular building blocks cancer cells can’t do without.

Maralice Conacci-Sorrell was recruited in 2015 from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she was a staff scientist, with the help of a First-Time Tenure Track Award from CPRIT. She joined the Department of Cell Biology.

Conacci-Sorrell’s postdoctoral research focused on an oncogene that helps cancer cells metastasize. Coming to Texas, she planned to look for small molecules—potential drugs—that would interfere with this process. But she found herself pursuing another path: discovering how cancer cells obtain nutrients and utilize them differently from normal cells.

In particular, she’s focusing on amino acids, the fundamental cellular building blocks that form proteins. Cancer cells, dividing rapidly, utilize raw materials at a much faster pace than normal cells in order to create the biomass of a tumor.

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One key for targeting therapy to cancer cells and not harming normal cells is finding out what makes cancer cells different. A molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is trying to discover the cellular building blocks cancer cells can’t do without.

Maralice Conacci-Sorrell was recruited in 2015 from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she was a staff scientist, with the help of a First-Time Tenure Track Award from CPRIT. She joined the Department of Cell Biology.

Conacci-Sorrell’s postdoctoral research focused on an oncogene that helps cancer cells metastasize. Coming to Texas, she planned to look for small molecules—potential drugs—that would interfere with this process. But she found herself pursuing another path: discovering how cancer cells obtain nutrients and utilize them differently from normal cells.

In particular, she’s focusing on amino acids, the fundamental cellular building blocks that form proteins. Cancer cells, dividing rapidly, utilize raw materials at a much faster pace than normal cells in order to create the biomass of a tumor.

“We’re looking at nutrients that the body doesn’t produce on its own, but that must be taken in through diet,” she says. “We’re trying to find out if cancer cells are more dependent on some of these than normal cells.”

Her idea is to synthesize a diet devoid of nutrients specifically needed for cancer cell growth—which normal cells could do without for a while—in order to prevent tumors from being able to grow. Conacci-Sorrell envisions this being used in combination with other drugs in order to help chemotherapy be more effective.

The cellular compartment responsible for building the systems that make proteins—which is visibly larger in cancer cells—is a little factory, she says. “We’re trying to starve the factory of raw materials, or inhibit the factory only in cancer cells.”

Conacci-Sorrell found herself drawn to cancer research through personal experience. She cared for her mother as she was dying of pancreatic cancer, and a year later, her daughter was diagnosed with lymphoma. Her mother died; her daughter survived. But the experience left her with the lasting question, “Why are some cancers treatable and others not?” It also changed the direction of her research.

She said CPRIT and UT Southwestern made her feel like she was part of an institution that could really make a difference by bringing so many people together and creating a critical mass of scientific researchers devoted to ending cancer.

“We can go wherever the science takes us,” she says, with CPRIT’s flexible funding. “I don’t think I would be able to do what I’m doing here anywhere else. It’s been a very exciting time for me in science.”

Conacci-Sorrell received her undergraduate training in biology and master’s degree in morphology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She was a postdoctoral fellow and staff scientist at Fred Hutchinson beginning in 2005.

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