I am recently culturing lung cancer tumor cells and it's kind of bothering me that after deletion of FBS for like 4-5 days, the cells are still growing healthily in the dish. I have little experience in this field so I am wondering if anyone could povide me any advise on this. Is it normal for cancer cell to live a long time with very little nutrition??
The first thing tumor cells do when there are no available nutrients is to start the process of autophagy. This is unleashed by AMPkinase activation due to decreased ATP.
AMPK inhibits mTOR and autophagy starts.
This situation can keep cells alive until the point that ATP is reduced to 1/3 of its normal concentration. If p53 is not mutated and remains active after a loss of 2/3 of the ATP pool will drive the cell towards apoptosis.
Now if you inhibit autophagy with chloroquine or other inhibitor apoptosis will appear sooner.
I hope this i formation may help you. Good luck.
Serum starvation can induce cytoprotective autophagy to buffer stress stimuli. The duration of starvation in tumor cells really depends. Some cancer cells are even autophagy-addictive. You can read more reviews about autophagy in cancers, especially regarding your specific lung cancer cells.
Hope it may help you.
Jennifer
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