How do tumours adapt to nutrient stress?

Reduced blood flow contributes to tumour hypoxia and nutrient deprivation forcing cancer cells to adapt to ensure survival. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Ye et al show that a stress response pathway including the eIF2 kinase GCN2 and its downstream target, the transcriptional activator ATF4, is critical for proliferation and survival of tumour cells after starvation for amino acids or glucose and is essential for growth in vivo in a xenograft model. This study provides new mechanistic insight into how tumour cells sense and adapt to nutrient restriction and suggests new approaches for cancer chemotherapy.