Tumor Metabolism

Catalog description

Cancer is a disease of dysregulation of cellular growth machinery leading to loss of growth suppressive mechanisms, increased growth promoting signaling, and other key hallmarks supporting the clonal expansion of malignant cells. As the cancer phenotype progresses the tumor requires increasing amounts of metabolic intermediates to continue to grow. This leads to dramatic changes in the use of glucose, fatty acids, nitrogen containing metabolites and sterols by the tumor. These cellular changes have cascading effects on the cells in the local tumor microenvironment as well as other more distant environments such as the bone and skeletal muscle which can lead to organism wide metabolic dysregulation. The objective of this course is to provide an overview of these processes at the cellular, organ, and organism levels with emphasis on the interactions of the metabolic pathways and the potential to intervene in this metabolic dysregulation for the treatment of cancers.