Cancer: a simple metabolic disease?

Recent studies on the effects of the essential fatty acid metabolic intermediate, gamma-linolenic acid, on the growth of cancer cells in culture and on induced mammary cancer tumours in rats, strongly suggest that the metabolic defect in the cancer cells studied is simply a metabolic block involving the enzyme delta-6-desaturase. The latter enzyme is responsible for the conversion of linoleic acid to gamma-linolenic acid. These observations would suggest that cancer in the cell lines studied could be a relatively simple metabolic disease.