Scientists Create First-of-Its-Kind Metabolic Road Map of Cancer | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Scientists Create First-of-Its-Kind Metabolic Road Map of Cancer | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

"Scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have published a pioneering, cross-cancer analysis of changes in metabolism that occur during cancer progression. The [Pan-Cancer Metabolism Data Explorer] database they created will help researchers who wish to test hypotheses about how metabolic changes fuel cancer growth. The resource is being made available publicly online.

"Based on the analysis of more than 900 tumor samples across seven different types of cancer, the resulting collection is the largest of its kind and sets a benchmark for future research. A paper describing the results appears today in the journal Cell Systems.

"According to MSK computational biologist Ed Reznik, one of the paper's corresponding authors, the road map does for metabolism what genome-wide genetic studies have done for the search for cancer-related genes."

Related article: After Years of Neglect, Cancer Biologists Return to a Forgotten Field: Metabolism:

"This raised the question of what purpose Warburg metabolism [abnormally converting glucose to lactate] serves in cancer cells. Dr. Thompson's proposal, which he first laid out in 2008, is that Warburg metabolism provides the necessary building blocks for cancer cells to divide uncontrollably. This idea runs counter to a century of work on cancer metabolism, but it's proving to be a productive framework for research.

"What causes metabolism to go haywire in the first place? An important clue came in 2004, when Dr. Thompson discovered that mutations in a gene called AKT -- which is commonly mutated in cancer -- allows cells to take up glucose without restraint. This suggested to Dr. Thompson that what cancer-causing oncogenes do, fundamentally, is alter metabolism in ways that set cells down the path to cancer."

Jane McLelland, a Stage IV cancer survivor, has written extensively, in How to Starve Cancer, about the off-label use of well-known medications to block metabolic pathways for specific cancers.