This means that a treatment which could block the protein could represent a significant revolution in the future of cancer treatment. What’s more, unlike traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the use of PARP14 inhibitors would only kill cancer cells and not healthy ones. The next step is to design and generate new drugs that can block this protein and work out how to use them safely in patients.
The above quote from the article in Gizmodo that Eric posted indicates to me that it is not the simple lack of glucose in the diet that is being looked at to inhibit the PARP14 protein. New drugs would be developed for this purpose.
This reminds me a bit of how bortezomib (Velcade) encourages cell death in tumour cells by inhibiting the proteasome functions of recycling waste proteins into usable proteins again. The cells choke on their own cell waste. Somehow, bortezomib is fairly targeted on cancer cells, or else all of our cells would be targeted this way. The fact that cancer cells are growing at a higher metabolism than our normal cells is used for many chemotherapies.
