Penn State researchers have discovered a potential way of blocking cancer cell replication, a breakthrough they think may lead to new treatments.

“We’re so excited,” Songon An, postdoctoral fellow in the department of chemistry, said.

The researchers, led by professor Stephen Benkovic, studied the creation of purines, which are vital for cell replication.

Purines are adenine and guanine, two of the four building blocks of DNA.

The team examined cervical and breast cancer cells because these cells need more purines to support their rapid replication, An said.

“By using these cancer cell lines it’s easier to detect this kind of complex in a living cell,” An said.

When purines were added, the enzymes were scattered throughout the cell, and when purines were removed, the enzymes clustered together, she said. This suggested that the clusters were functionally important for making purines.

If researchers find a way to disrupt the formation of the clusters, it could become a potential target for cancer treatments, Benkovic said in a press release posted on Penn State Live.

“We think that these functional complexes might be a target for drugs in cancer treatment,” Erin Sheets, assistant professor of chemistry, said.

Benkovic could not be immediately reached for comment.

The group used fluorescence microscopy, a method that makes the enzyme easily visible by attaching a fluorescent protein to it, Sheets said.

“If you think about in Beaver Stadium, if you label Daryll Clark’s hat with a red helmet you can see where he was at,” she said.

By making these proteins visible, the researchers were able to clearly see enzymes’ locations within cells.

The Benkovic group “kickstarted this finding,” An said. The group has been studying the possible interaction of enzyme clusters for a long time, but could not see the interactions in solution experiments, he said. This was the first time groups of enzymes were studied together in living cells.

“We have to move on to the living cells even though it was a hard transition,” he said.

The findings were published in the April 4 issue of the journal Science.

However, there is still more research to do before treatments are created, Sheets said.

“We still really need to understand the nature of these complexes — these clusters of proteins,” she said.

There are “a lot of questions still to answer,” and it takes the Food and Drug Administration about 10 to 15 years to study and test a new drug before it can be approved for the public, postdoctoral associate Ravindra Kumar said.

“It should be able to inhibit the purine synthesis in all types of cancer cells,” he said.

The problem with almost every cancer treatment is that normal cells are killed in the process of destroying cancer cells, Omkar Bhat (senior-biology) said.

“The same thing [is] probably true with this method, [but] this is one avenue of research that might yield something. I think it’s something that could be promising,” Bhat said.