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Researchers have found a surprisingly common vulnerability in a broad variety of cancers and have begun designing drug compounds to exploit it, in a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine. The findings suggest the possibility of a potent, low-side-effect treatment that could benefit many patients with colorectal, breast and other cancer types.

The new strategy targets a signaling pathway called the WNT pathway, whose hyperactivity is common in cancers and boosts malignancy through multiple mechanisms. Targeting WNT signaling without harming normal cells has been notoriously difficult. However, in the study, which appears Nov. 2 in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers found that many cancer cells are deficient in one of two redundant WNT-supporting enzymes. They showed that selectively targeting the remaining one reduces WNT signaling in such cells with no apparent effect on healthy cells. The researchers demonstrated the strategy successfully in early preclinical experiments with a selective enzyme inhibitor they developed.