OTTAWA A team of University of Ottawa researchers has solved the mystery of how our bodies adapt to low-oxygen environments, raising the prospect that life-threatening conditions such as cancer, stroke and heart disease could someday be successfully treated using a simple, antibiotic-like drug.

The teams findings were published Sunday in Nature, the worlds leading scientific journal.

Its a tremendously important discovery in understanding how life without oxygen works, said Dr. Stephen Lee, a professor in the universitys Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, whose laboratory did the groundbreaking research.

Scientists have known for decades that in the presence of oxygen, cells make proteins the building blocks of life using a process called protein synthesis. But how they do so in conditions of limited oxygen had remained a mystery.

Theres a huge amount of research, hundreds of thousands of papers, Lee said in an interview. But still nobody has discovered how we make the basic building blocks of life in these conditions. Thats what we discovered.

Lees team found theres an oxygen-regulated switch in the protein synthesis machinery, a very novel and unexpected way of synthesizing proteins, Lee said. Its very different.

The discovery explains, for the first time, how mountain climbers and highland Tibetans are able to adapt and function in environments that would kill or sicken most people.

These are very basic processes of life, Lee said. Its kind of strange that we discovered this in the 21st century. That tells you there are still basic processes that we just dont know exist.

The implications for cancer treatment, though still speculative, are potentially huge. Lees team discovered that cancer cells proliferate by using the same protein synthesis machinery the body employs to deal with low levels of oxygen.

Cancer cells utilize that way of producing proteins without oxygen, even if oxygen is present, Lee said. They hijack that system and that drives their proliferation.

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Researchers' discovery offers hope for cancer, heart disease miracle drugs