Breast cancer has a new metabolic Achilles' heel

Cancer is a complex disease without a specific single origin. Despite recent advances in this field, knowledge of the relationship between the metabolic networks of tumoural cells and the normal cells from their tissue of origin is limited. Here, Mahendralingam et al., by using a combination of multi-omic and cell-based techniques to characterize the metabolic programs of normal mammary epithelial cells, find that mammary cancer cells preserve the metabolic network and vulnerabilities of their cells of origin, thus uncovering a new putative Achilles' heel in breast cancer.