Metabolite systems profiling identifies exploitable weaknesses in retinoblastoma

Published in "aheadofprint"
Kumar R Sahoo S , Nicolay B Ranjith , Elchuri SV Miles , W Raman , K Subramanian , K Ganesan , S Rishi , P Khetan , V Sivaraman , K Mohite O

Retinoblastoma (RB) is a childhood eye cancer. Currently, chemotherapy, local therapy, and enucleation are the main ways in which these tumors are managed. The present work is the first study that uses constraint-based reconstruction and analysis approaches to identify and explain RB-specific survival strategies, which are RB tumor specific. Importantly, our model-specific secretion profile is also found in RB1-depleted human retinal cells in vitro and suggests that novel biomarkers involved in lipid metabolism may be important. Finally, RB-specific synthetic lethals have been predicted as lipid and nucleoside transport proteins that can aid in novel drug target development.