Targeting Sugar Uptake and Metabolism for Cancer Identification and Therapy: An Overview

Metabolic deregulations have emerged as a cancer characteristic, opening a broad avenue for strategies and tools to target cancer through sugar uptake and metabolism. High expression levels of sugar transporters in cancer cells offered glycoconjugation as an approach to achieve enhanced cellular accumulation of drugs and imaging agents, with the sugar moiety anchoring the bioactive cargo to cancer cells. On the other hand, high demand for sugar nutrients in cancers provided a new avenue to target cancer cells with metabolic or sugar uptake inhibitors to induce cancer cells starvation or death. This overview summarizes recent advances in targeting cancer cells through sugar transport for cancer detection and therapy.