Overview of Cancer Metabolism and Signaling Transduction

Despite the remarkable progress in cancer treatment up to now, we are still far from conquering the disease. The most substantial change after the malignant transformation of normal cells into cancer cells is the alteration in their metabolism. Cancer cells reprogram their metabolism to support the elevated energy demand as well as the acquisition and maintenance of their malignancy, even in nutrient-poor environments. The metabolic alterations, even under aerobic conditions, such as the upregulation of the glucose uptake and glycolysis (the Warburg effect), increase the ROS (reactive oxygen species) and glutamine dependence, which are the prominent features of cancer metabolism. Among these metabolic alterations, high glutamine dependency has attracted serious attention in the cancer research community. In addition, the oncogenic signaling pathways of the well-known important genetic mutations play important regulatory roles, either directly or indirectly, in the central carbon metabolism. The identification of the convergent metabolic phenotypes is crucial to the targeting of cancer cells. In this review, we investigate the relationship between cancer metabolism and the signal transduction pathways, and we highlight the recent developments in anti-cancer therapy that target metabolism.