The analysis was fabricated by the aggregation at the Breakthrough Breast Blight Research Unit at the University of Manchester.
They said it could adviser "an important new way of dressmaking treatments" to the needs of blight patients.
A team, led by Assistant Michael Lisanti, begin that some blight beef activate accustomed advantageous beef to augment them "high-energy foods", accepted as lactate and ketones.
They apparent that Metformin, a accepted biologic acclimated to amusement diabetes, blocked the process.
New approach
Patients whose blight beef "fed" off high-energy compounds were added acceptable to see their tumours advance or become terminal, they found.
It meant they could be helped by getting accustomed the diabetes drug, which about cuts off the "fuel supply" for advancing blight cells.
Scientists acclimated the allegation to advance a adjustment to adumbrate which patients had a poor cast - and those who could account from the drug.
"The abeyant account [of administering drug] is that it will stop the blight corpuscle getting fed by the accustomed corpuscle and again the blight corpuscle won't grow," the assistant told the BBC.
"So this represents a rather new access to the analysis of cancer.
"It's a actual agitative development because we accept a accomplished new breadth to advance at the blight cell, how it feeds itself from the accustomed cells.
"And we can attending to see what sorts of added drugs block this alternation amid the blight corpuscle and the accustomed cell."