Vitamins are supposedly good for you, but some might also be good for cancer, Swiss researchers at the University of Lausanne found.

Cancer cells have a weakness. They depend on the protein glutamine to produce the energy needed to divide and grow. The Swiss researchers found that cancer cells can escape this weakness with the help of Vitamin B7, or biotin. Without biotin, a protein produced mainly in muscle tissue, cancer cells lose that flexibility and stop growing.

“This research opens up new avenues for better understanding the metabolic vulnerabilities of cancers,” the senior author Alexis Jourdain said in a university release, “and for designing innovative therapeutic strategies that take into account the great metabolic flexibility of tumor cells, notably by targeting several metabolic pathways simultaneously.”

They published their work in the journal Molecular Cell in February.

While muscles make the lion’s share, every cell in the body can create glutamine under appropriate conditions, providing a ready source of energy, according to the National Institutes of Health. Cancer research has focused on preventing cancer tissue from producing glutamine for many decades.

“What’s special about glutamine is that all the other nonessential amino acids can be made from it, but other nonessential amino acids cannot substitute for glutamine,” biochemist Dr. Natasha Pavlova says on the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center website. “It’s also central to several biochemical pathways that cancer cells use to build new cell parts.”

Blocking cancer cells from importing glutamine from blood or other tissues is one way to starve cancer tissue, she writes, because cancer uses so much glutamine that scientists call it “glutamine addiction.” However, there is no safe way to reduce the amount of glutamine in the body because it is so widely produced within cells.

Biotin is an essential nutrient, usually found attached to proteins in food and is also used to support the growth of skin, hair and nails, the NIH website states.

While you also cannot eliminate protein from a healthy diet, Jourdain said targeting biotin in cancer tissues, along with glutamine production and absorption and other cell functions, could help improve future cancer treatment by robbing cancer cells of their adaptability.

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