Exploring cancer metabolism
Nearly 100 years ago, the German chemist Otto Warburg discovered that cancer cells metabolize nutrients differently than most normal cells. His discovery launched the field of cancer metabolism research, but interest in this area waned; by the 1970s most cancer scientists had shifted their focus to the genetic mutations that drive cancer development. In the past decade or so, interest in cancer metabolism has resurged, and the first drugs that target cancer cells’ abnormal metabolism were approved to treat leukemia in 2017. “Cancer metabolism is a very sophisticated field at this point,” says Matthew Vander Heiden, an associate professor of biology at MIT. “We have a lot better understanding of what nutrients cancer cells use and what determines how those nutrients are used. This has led to different ways to think about drugs.” Vander Heiden, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, is one of the people...