A recent article in Nature describes the resurgence of interest in cancer cell metabolism. This means exploiting the unique metabolic dependencies of cancer cells, such as their increased demand for glucose.

Cancer cells' preference for glucose is named after 1931 Nobelist Otto Warburg

Otto Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1931, noticed that cancer cells have a “sweet tooth” decades ago, but only recently have researchers learned enough about cancer cells’ regulatory circuitry to possibly use this to their advantage.

At Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, several scientists have been investigating aspects of this phenomenon. Jing Chen and his team have identified a switch, the enzyme pyruvate kinase, which many types of cancer use to control glucose metabolism, and that might be a good drug target.

Jing Chen, PhD, and Taro Hitosugi, PhD

Shi-Yong Sun, Wei Zhou and their colleagues have found that cancer cells are sneaky: blockade the front door (for glucose metabolism, this means hitting them with the chemical 2-deoxyglucose) and they escape out the back by turning on certain survival pathways. This means combination tactics or indirectly targeting glucose metabolism through the molecule mTOR might be more effective, the Nature article says.

A quote from the article:

Clearly, metabolic pathways are highly interconnected with pathways that govern the hallmarks of cancer, such as unrestrained proliferation and resistance to cell death. The many metabolic enzymes, intermediates and products involved could be fertile ground for improving cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.