Tumor metabolism
The term cancer does not refer to a single disorder, but to a
large number of diseases characterized by the uncontrolled growth
of abnormal or mutated cells in the body that have the ability to
proliferate and infiltrate normal body tissue. Cancer metabolism
is one of the oldest and most important field of research in
biology, by some fifty years, also because cancers are one of the
leading cause of death in Western countries. Over time, there has
been an increase of survival rates for many types of tumours,
thanks to available screening programmes and treatments'
improvement.
Researches related to tumour metabolism are
based on the principle that cancer cells exhibit altered
metabolic activities relative to normal cells, as originally
observed by Otto Warburg almost 100 years ago. The energetics
reprogramming, that allows to take up abundant nutrients to
produce ATP, and increased localised ROS are considered a
hallmark of cancer.
Glycolysis is an early attractive target
for understanding cancer, as many tumours show a significant
increase in glucose uptake compared with adjacent normal tissue.
Cancer cells are able to maintain a high rate of glycolysis even
under oxygen−sufficient conditions, a process known as
aerobic glycolysis or Warburg effect. This observation is at the
basis of [18F]−fluorodeoxyglucose accumulation
in tumour tissues used in positron emission tomography
(FDG−PET).
In last decades, hyperpolarized (HP) probes
have provided a unique tool for the non-invasive assessment of
altered metabolic conditions through magnetic resonance (MR)
spectroscopy and imaging. 13C−HP pyruvate,
obtained using dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization
(d−DNP) and more recently by Parahydrogen Induced
Hyperpolarization (PHIP), is the most widely applied HP
metabolite. Unfortunately, the wide application of this powerful
diagnostic method is limited to few laboratories due to the high
costs of the polarizer.
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