As bowel cancer becomes more common among people in their 50s and younger, concerns about early-onset cancer have been magnified by the disease’s growing resistance to chemotherapy.
But in what could prove to be a hopeful sign for patients, a team of Britain-based scientists has figured out what has been making treatment less effective.
Colorectal cancer cells that survive a dose of the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil (5FU) are able to adapt their mitochondria – the cell’s energy hubs – to evade treatment, according to researchers at Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB).
“Cancer cells can reprogramme these functions to support tumour growth and withstand stress, which helps them resist treatments that would otherwise eliminate them,” says QUB Johnston Cancer Research Centre senior lecturer Dr Emma Kerr.
“Mitochondria are critical hubs in normal cells, coordinating energy production, metabolism and the signals that determine whether a cell survives or dies,” says the lead author of a paper published in the science journal Nature Metabolism.
“Therapy resistance is attributed to over 80% of cancer deaths per year, emphasising the urgent need to overcome this challenge for improved patient outcomes,” Dr Kerr and her colleagues say in their paper, explaining that 5FU remains “poorly understood”.
What they found is that 5FU causes metabolic stress in cancer cells, in turn triggering their mitochondria to look for ways to survive.
Resistance to medication “remains the greatest difficulty for effective treatment of patients with cancer worldwide”, the researchers conclude.
ALSO READ: Cancer’s secret weapon to evade death
Meanwhile, a Mayo Clinic team has figured out a “previously unknown mechanism” by which damaged or “dysfunctional” mitochondria “drive the chronic inflammation” seen in many age-related diseases, including cancers.
Published in the journal Nature in late July (2026), the United States-based clinic’s paper outlined that such “zombie” cells accumulate as people age. – dpa
