Cancers are driven to make copies of themselves, however, if cancerous cells run out of the building blocks of their DNA they develop "DNA replication stress".
The research team identified three genes often lost in diverse bowel cancer cells, which were critical for the cancer suffering from DNAreplication stress.
Prof Balasubramaninan said that was of key interest in the study of cancers, which were usually driven by genes, or oncogenes, that had mutated to increase DNAreplication.
Most have one or more treatments on the market that act as HIV virus inhibitors to prevent the HIV virus from inserting the DNA genetic code necessary for replication into healthy cells.